Rob Edwards

Scotland's dirtiest waste incinerator to be barred from operating

27 August 2013

The operating licence for Scotland's dirtiest waste incinerator is to be revoked on 23 September, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has announced.

Scotgen's ailing energy-from-waste plant in Dumfries, which has breached pollution limits hundreds of times and last month suffered a major fire, is now almost certain to close. The company recently told the Court of Session that it was planning to go into administration.

Sepa's highly unusual move follows Scotgen's failure to comply with an legal enforcement notice requiring 800 tonnes of partially burnt waste to be removed from the plant so that it didn't stink and attract rats.

According to Sepa, the waste plant was guilty of "persistent non-compliance with the requirements of the permit." It had also failed to maintain enough resources to pay for cleaning up the mess it had made, and had failed in its main aim of recovering energy efficiently.

Troubled waste incinerator on verge of bankruptcy and closure

from The Herald, 26 August 2013

Scotland’s pioneering and highly polluting waste incinerator is on the brink of bankruptcy and closure, casting doubt on the future of similar plants proposed around the country.

Scotgen, a company that has been trying to commission a controversial new energy-from-waste plant in Dumfries since 2009, has told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that it is intending to go into administration.

At the same time, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) is reviewing the plant’s authorisation to operate, following hundreds of pollution breaches, an explosion and a major fire. Since February, Sepa has slapped three legal notices on Scotgen requiring it to clean up its operations.

The most recent on 26 July ordered the company to remove partially burnt waste from the site left after the fire last month so that it didn’t stink or attract flies and rats. According to Sepa, Scotgen has so far failed to comply and its plant is not currently operating.

"Sepa is currently assessing Scotgen's overall performance with complying with the conditions of the permit,” said Ian Conroy, Sepa's technical support manager in the southwest. “We are currently considering the further action that is necessary to be taken with regards to recent events and the historical performance of the facility.”

According to Dr Richard Dixon, the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, the Dumfries plant now “looks doomed”. This was “bad news” for up to a dozen similar plants planned across Scotland, he argued.

“No community in Scotland can have confidence that any other company can do what Scotgen has repeatedly failed to do,” he said. “The failure of the Scotgen plant shows us that we should give up plans to burn waste and work much harder on recycling and avoiding waste in the first place.”

BT facing questions from investors over links to drone strikes

from Sunday Herald, 25 August 2013

The British communications giant, BT, is being quizzed by major investors over its alleged links to covert US drone strikes blamed for killing hundreds of people in Yemen and Somalia.

The Sunday Herald revealed last month that BT was the subject of a formal complaint to the UK government by a human rights group, Reprieve. The complaint concerns a $23 million contract to provide fibre-optic cables connecting Camp Lemonnier, a US drone base in the East African republic of Djibouti, to RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, which serves as a major US communications base.

Lemonnier is the main centre for US drone operations outside Afghanistan. It sends Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles armed with Hellfire missiles on “targeted killing” missions against suspected terrorist cells in Yemen and Somalia.

But Reprieve says that the attacks violate international law, and they are under investigation by the United Nations. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at City University in London, confirmed drone strikes in Yemen since 2002 have killed between 268 and 393 people, of whom 21-58 were civilians, and five were children.

BT’s initial response to the complaint was to say that it was “comfortable having the US government as a client”. But now it has come under pressure from its investors to justify its position.

UK government under fire for trying to ‘hide’ air pollution by cutting back monitoring

from The Guardian, 22 August 2013

Up to 600 stations for monitoring air pollution across England will be shut down under new government plans to save money by cutting regulations.

Ministers want to remove obligations on local authorities to assess air quality in their areas, enabling monitoring to be reduced. But environmental campaigners are accusing them of trying to hide one of the country’s biggest public health problems.

Government advisers have estimated that one type of pollutant – miniscule particles from diesel engines, fossil fuel power stations and other sources - is killing 29,000 people a year in the UK, and costing health services about £16 billion.

But European air pollution limits meant to protect health are being breached in urban areas across the country, with the highest levels in London. According to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the limits for the toxic exhaust gas, nitrogen dioxide, were exceeded in 40 of the UK’s 43 air quality zones in 2010.

But now Defra has launched a six-week consultation, due to close on 30 August, proposing a radical overhaul of the local air quality management regime that has been in place since 1997. The proposals are aimed at helping meet ministers’ “red tape challenge” to roll back legislation in order to help businesses.

Council forces Trump to back down on planning breach at golf resort

from Sunday Herald, 18 August 2015

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Susan Munro, one of Donald Trump’s famed and much-troubled neighbours on the northeast coast of Scotland. “It was the first time they listened to me and did something. It was a historic event.”

In an unprecedented move, Aberdeenshire Council has told the outspoken US property tycoon what to do with his controversial golf course - and he’s done it. It’s a sign that, slowly but significantly, the way the local authority is treating Trump is becoming more robust and challenging.

This week Trump is launching a public consultation on his plans to build a second 18-hole links golf course at the Menie estate on the Aberdeenshire coast. He will need planning permission from the council to go ahead with the development.

Munro has lived in Leyton Cottage at Menie for 30 years. Since Trump’s £750 million golf resort was given the go-ahead by the Scottish government in 2008, she has been threatened, along with other neighbours, with the possibility of compulsory purchase and plunged into a series of conflicts over the development.

Contractors have piled huge mounds of earth around her house and garden, to hide them from golfers. She claims the embankments, which have been planted with trees, have blocked her view, cut out natural light and increased the risk of flooding.

“I can’t see a damn thing here, I really can’t. It’s awful. I’m trapped, it’s like a wall all around me,” she told the Sunday Herald last week. “I’m not getting any light. If the trees grow, I won’t be able to see the sky.”

Revealed: how the police planned to downplay Trump film

from Sunday Herald, 18 August 2013

The police privately planned a concerted public relations strategy to try and play down the impact of a television documentary that showed two filmmakers being arrested near Donald Trump’s golf resort on the Aberdeenshire coast.

Internal emails obtained by the Sunday Herald reveal that police officers agreed to manage the broadcast of the film on BBC2 last October in a “low-key” way in an attempt to dampen public interest. They also prepared to receive complaints from the public.

The multiple award-winning documentary, ‘You’ve Been Trumped’, featured dramatic footage of its director, Anthony Baxter, and producer, Richard Phinney, being forcibly taken into custody while filming at the Menie estate near Balmedie in July 2010. All charges were subsequently dropped, and the police made a partial apology.

After being screened in cinemas across Scotland and at film festivals internationally, the film’s television premiere on 21 October 2012 prompted a storm of protest about the police action. But emails released by the police under freedom of information law show that they were doing their best to contain any damage the documentary might do.

Five days before the broadcast, the then assistant chief constable of Grampian Police, Simon Blake, emailed colleagues to say that he was co-ordinating a response to the film. “The force should manage this issue in a low-key and proportionate manner,” he said.

“I would not seek to take a high-profile approach that would serve to escalate the matter.” He proposed the preparation of a police statement that would only be provided to the media “if asked”.

Three of Britain’s nuclear warheads are being dismantled every year

from The Guardian, 11 August 2013

Quietly, slowly and without any fuss, Britain is dismantling its nuclear weapons. Three Trident warheads a year are being moved from the Clyde to the home counties to be taken to pieces, according to evidence seen by The Guardian.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has revealed that it is overseeing a programme “to disassemble Trident warheads” at Burghfield in Berkshire, in a way that will prevent them from being put back together. This fulfills a government promise to cut the number of the nation’s nuclear weapons from 225 to 180 by the mid 2020s.

The latest monitoring of nuclear bomb convoys by activists suggests that in 2012 five warheads were sent by road to Burghfield from the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport on Loch Long near Glasgow. Two were refurbished and returned north, they said, while three stayed at Burghfield to be dismantled.

Ministers announced in June 2011 that Britain’s stockpile of nuclear weapons was being reduced by 45 to “no more than 180” over about 15 years to comply with international disarmament obligations. Until now it’s not been clear what was happening to the warheads, with critics suspicious that they could just be disarmed and stored ready to be rearmed if necessary.

But in response to a freedom of information request the MoD has made clear that the weapons are being dismantled at Burghfield. There is a secretive and heavily-fortified weapons disassembly plant on the site operated for the MoD by a private consortium, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE).

The MoD's private plans to buy more of Cape Wrath condemned as 'arrogant'

from Sunday Herald, 11 August 2013

A fierce war of words has erupted between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Scottish government over plans to expand a big bombing range at Cape Wrath in the far northwest of Scotland.

Internal emails obtained by the Sunday Herald reveal that the MoD has not abandoned its ambitions to buy more land at the cape, despite a competing bid from the local community. Its attitude has been condemned as “laughable” and “arrogant” by the Scottish environment and rural affairs minister, Richard Lochhead MSP.

The MoD announced publicly on 13 May that it had decided “not to proceed” with the purchase of land around the cape’s famous lighthouse, built in 1828 by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather. But a private MoD memo the same month makes clear that the Royal Navy is still “interested” in buying the land.

If the local community bid fails, officials suggest that the MoD’s interest could be “rekindled” and it could try again. One email on 4 July notes that that the MoD may have the “political clout” to fight the Scottish government for the purchase “on grounds of national security needs”.

But Lochhead yesterday derided the MoD's stance. “It’s beyond belief that the MoD think that the local community becoming owners of the land at Cape Wrath is a threat to national security,” he said.

“Perhaps they might like to explain if it’s tourists enjoying the views, locals having tea and cakes in the café, or walkers completing the Scottish National Trail that pose the greatest threat. It’s this sort of arrogant Whitehall attitude which could have stopped the community getting the chance to buy the land at Cape Wrath.”

Britain’s old nuclear submarines are wearing out and running risks, warns MoD report

from The Guardian, 04 August 2013

Britain’s ageing hunter-killer nuclear submarines are suffering mounting technical problems that could endanger the safety of sailors and the public, a report from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has warned.

Five Trafalgar-class submarines, between 22 and 29 years old, are running into reliability issues with the reactors that power them, increasing the risk of cracks, pipe failures and radiation leaks. The oldest, HMS Tireless, leaked radioactive coolant from its reactor for eight days in February.

At the moment the problems are being effectively managed, says the report from the MoD’s internal safety watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR). But it has issued a new amber warning that "attention is required to ensure maintenance of adequate safety performance".

The problems have arisen because the operational lives of Trafalgar submarines have had to be extended to cope with prolonged delays in bringing Astute-class submarines into service to replace them. After billion-pound budget overruns and repeated construction and teething difficulties, only two of seven proposed new submarines are currently in the water.

The Royal Navy’s five Trafalgar boats, launched between 1984 and 1991, are now all expected to function for up to 33 years, with the last one not being mothballed until 2022. “As a result, the Trafalgar class are operating at the right hand end of their ‘bathtub’ reliability curves,” says the DNSR report.

This means that the number of problems being encountered by the boats is increasing steeply as they reach the ends of graphs shaped like baths. “The effect has been seen in a number of emergent technical issues over the last few years" which “can be directly attributed to the effects of plant ageing”, the report says.

Aberdeenshire police accused of acting like Trump’s ‘private security force’

from Sunday Herald, 04 August 2013

Police in Aberdeenshire were “understandably” seen as biased in favour of the New York property tycoon, Donald Trump, and against local residents, an internal police investigation seen by the Sunday Herald has concluded.

Maintaining a neutral stance in the prolonged and bitter arguments over Trump’s plans for a golf resort at Menie on the northeast coast was “an impossibly hard task” because the “majority of our calls” came from Trump’s staff, the investigation report said.

Residents and campaigners accused the police of acting as Trump’s “private security force” instead of protecting the interests of local people. Trump’s spokesman, however, dismissed the accusations as “absolutely pathetic”.

Police Scotland has released 26 pages of correspondence and reports about fiercely disputed events at Menie three years ago. This follows an investigation by the Scottish Information Commissioner, Rosemary Agnew.

Police officers were present on 3 August 2010 when Trump’s representatives used mechanical diggers to move a boat and other equipment belonging to Michael Forbes, one of the billionaire’s highest profile local opponents. They then watched as a fence was erected on what Forbes claimed was his land.