Energy in History

Opposing nuclear power

Britain embraced nuclear power during the 1950s, but by the 1970s, nuclear power had become a controversial subject.

Scottish nationalists and nascent environmentalists both saw nuclear energy and nuclear weapons as highly interdependent. They also viewed nuclear electricity generation as wasteful and potentially dangerous.

The building of an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor at Torness Point in East Lothian, near Edinburgh, created a focal point for opposition and the formation of the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace. 

Torness protest picture from Torness: Nuclear Power Station: From Folly to Fiasco (Edinburgh: SCRAM, 1983) 

Nuclear waste cartoon, Aether magazine vol 5 (2) (1980). Scottish Political Archive. 

"So long as Scotland has control of adequate alternative energy sources, it is not in the national interest to generate a higher proportion of power from nuclear fission reactions producing plutonium or other radioactive wastes which cerate problems of disposal to which no solution has yet been found."

SNP Policy Document 7: Energy (c.1976)  

"Torness, already the focus for the first major act of civil disobedience against nuclear power in Britain, is unlikely to be forgotten."

Michael Flood, Torness: Keep it Green (London: Friends of the Earth, 1979) 

Campaigners's voices

Linda Hendry joined SCRAM in the 1970s and later worked for the organisation. Interview from 2021.

"I moved up to Edinburgh to go to university, and my mother moved up to Edinburgh after my father died. And she joined Friends of the Earth, and in 1976, she dragged us out to Torness – well, she didn’t drag us out to Torness. But I had a small baby at the time, and I mean, it was supposed to be a Sunday run, I suppose, to somewhere nice. But when we got there, the haar was in, so it was pretty dismal. And I sort of, I actually thought, let them build a nuclear power station here, you know, it's a dump, I don't care.

"But we went somewhere else, and it was sunny where we went on to. But I'm not completely sure how I got involved with SCRAM.  But I started going to meetings in a place they had in Ainslie Place. But SCRAM was definitely an offshoot of Friends of the Earth, but I didn’t join it because I was in Friends of the Earth, because I wasn’t. But somebody must’ve said, go along, or come along."

Pete Roche, a founding member of SCRAM who remains a committed anti-nuclear activist, speaking in 2021.

"I mean, when we started to plan the biggest demonstration that I helped with, which was in 1978 at Torness, and again on the site, we basically had to invent the anti-nuclear movement. 

"So the way we went about it was, we got hold of a Peace News diary which, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these, but there are really good directories at the back of every sort of radical group you could imagine. And there was, in particular, we made use of the list of wholefood shops. Wholefood shops and cooperatives were beginning to appear in towns and cities all over the country and we knew from going into Real Foods in Edinburgh that they would probably have a big notice board with all sorts of things on it. 

"So we just posted out posters to every wholefood shop that we could find in the country, and that started the ball rolling basically. I mean, I ended up getting about five thousand people from all over the country turning up at our demonstration in May, 1978."

Next section: What is a 'Just Transition'?