SECOND to support for Scottish independence, opposition to nuclear power is one of the SNP’s articles of faith.
Their opposition to Nato was ditched in 2012 and their Euroscepticism, which saw the party campaign to leave the European Community in 1975, was transformed into a full-fat “stop Brexit” campaign around 40 years later.
But opposition to nuclear power has remained firm.
There are of course practical reasons for this, according to former senior SNP office bearer Isobel Lindsay, a vice chair of the Scottish CND.
“No one with Scotland’s interests at heart would suggest that we go down the nuclear power route because simply from a practical, economic point of view, it would be madness,” she said.
The costs of decommissioning a nuclear power plant are “eyewatering” and there are still enormous safety concerns, said Lindsay (above).
“Decommissioning is both a massive cost and it’s leaving all that legacy of nuclear waste,” Lindsay added.
“A serious error can be pretty disastrous.”
And once oil reared its head – in a time before concerns about fossil fuels had gone mainstream – it would be counterintuitive for a Scottish nationalist worth their salt to argue for a competing industry which might lower the price of a barrel of black gold.
Lindsay said: “Our oil resources were regarded as a very substantial advantage.”
Their opposition was also forged in reaction against dismissive UK governments, which saw Scotland as a convenient place in which to build nuclear power plants, and store weapons of mass destruction, away from the populous southeast of England.
“One of the reasons why Caithness was selected way back as the first of the experimental stations was because of its remoteness from the southeast, the Midlands and the southern population of England,” said Lindsay.
Given the SNP’s historical identity as a party which represented these “remote” parts of Scotland, where local opposition to nuclear was rife, it made strategic sense for the party to back those campaigns.
And the SNP’s opposition has endured to this day. New nuclear plants are de facto banned in Scotland. Successive nationalist first ministers have refused to get caught up in Tory or Labour enthusiasm for small modular reactors, of which there are only two in operation worldwide, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Campaigners found their concerns about safety validated by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and more recently by the meltdown at Fukushima in 2011.
But under different circumstances, the SNP’s opposition to nuclear power may have softened, perhaps confronted with realpolitik concerns about energy security, especially in light of the price crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And it does not logically follow that a party in favour of Scottish independence is necessarily opposed to nuclear power.
The underlying reason that the SNP have remained so steadfast in this gets to the core of who they are as a political party.
Lindsay said: “There was this feeling of distrust, that people wouldn’t be told the truth about leaks. This was something that Scotland didn’t control and that we didn’t need.”
Proponents of nuclear power can say that safety concerns are legitimate, but ultimately one must trust that the people in charge will make sure it’s ok.
Scottish nationalists come at this from a radically different perspective: they don’t like the British state, they don’t trust the British state – so why on earth would they trust it with potentially apocalyptic technology?
