What I learned when I visited Scotland's only nuclear power station

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

Already suited up is dosimetrist and radiological compliance officer, Andrea McPherson, a 30-year-old keen tennis player brought up in Dunbar, who runs the dose reports and confirms that 'background radiation is higher than what we occupationally receive here".
'If you fly to Spain,' she says, 'you're going to get much more than any of us. Everything is kept conservative. We have a LARP principle which is keep everything as low as reasonably possible. That's what hit me hard when I came here. The conservatism is really dominant which is great.'
Even those people working on the station's most radiologically risky area, the fuel route, Forrest tells me, receive just 2-3% additional radiation beyond background. 'We're highly regulated,' he says. 'We've got restrictions. Our annual restriction is 5 microsieverts annually. I'm in and out the reactor area all the time. Mine tends to be round about zero.'
Andrea McPherson in Torness power station's turbine hall (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) Scotland's only remaining working nuclear reactor, set to close in 2030, is managed, like the rest of the UK's nuclear plants, by the French-government-owned EDF (Électricité de France) and follows the company's safety principles, the most highly-emphasised of which appears to be banister-holding when walking up and down stairs.
'How I describe it is a visible manifestation of your safety culture,' Forrest observes. 'We hold the handrail. That's what we do. So when you walk through the workplace you're holding the handrail. It's like a mindset. You're locking in. You find that when you go to Edinburgh Airport all the EDF people hold the handrail.'
Handrail holding is stressed so many times it begins to feel like a reassurance as much as a safety principle. Everything will all be okay, even though, as has been much reported, cracks have appeared in the graphite of Torness's aging reactors. Everything will be okay because, though there have been some truly catastrophic accidents in nuclear power's global history, for the most part the biggest risk to employees is from slips, trips and falls.
The power plant has recently been given a two-year life-extension from 2028 to 2030, throughout which it will continue to check and test the concerning cracks in its graphite core. 'The extension,' says Forrest, 'was very welcomed. Our demographic here average age is 43. Whole bunch of people in their twenties and thirties, for them that security and those few years more, very important there.'
Torness power station director, Paul Forrest, next to a turbine (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times)
There is a lot, on the tour, that seems mundane or familiar. Gaskets, it turns out, are the most common bit of kit that needs to be replaced. 'The kind of kit and skills we've got here,' says Forrest, 'are not dissimilar to the water industry.'
A butterfly flutters through the turbine hall, dancing this way and that. It's a reminder, as it flits past the two sky blue turbines, of the biodiversity programme being carried out on the site, which has, I am told, seen butterfly species in the area increase from 12 to 21. Peregrine falcons also breed on the roof of the building, where a camera is installed.
The gas turbines, which bear a plaque dated 1985, are elegant, classic industrial machines which have been kept running over the year by regular maintenance and repairs in three-yearly outages.
They are also the same as the turbines, generating by spinning magnets, that might have been found in coal or oil power stations of the era. Even the UK's planned new reactor, Sizewell C, will generate using turbines not so very different, though bigger, and with two magnets perpendicular to each other so that it can rotate at lower revolutions.
The way Forrest touches the turbine as he presses a hand against its surface to show its warmth, seems almost admiring, and he observes, 'We'll take that turbine apart every three years. It's just a beautiful machine.'
His admiration for the design extends to the whole power station. Some years ago, however, when he was working as station director at Hunterston B, he featured in an episode of Great British Railway Journeys, greeting Michael Portillo with the words, 'Welcome to the most beautiful power station in the world.' By the time it aired on television, slightly awkwardly, he had been taken up post in Torness.
But Forrest obviously also feels a keen appreciation of the distinctive, pale block of Torness, whose light grey form, on the East Lothian coast against the sea, in a colour believed to have been chosen to match the sky, is so iconic it featured on the cover of a Teenage Fanclub single, Ain't that Enough.
Inside, Torness feels like going back in time. Following a previous visit I made to the plant, in the company of family and friends, what lingered most in my mind was the aesthetics of the control room, which bore the design of another age. Looking down into it felt like traveling back in time: lowing buttons and ivory panels, green and red 1980s-style phones, and box files lining the walls.
Journalist Vicky Allan and photographer Gordon Terris in the reactor hall at Torness (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times)
But this latest tour is taking me further into the heart of the plant, and into the radiologically controlled area, access to which is via a tight system of security. Prior to entry I'm issued with a pocket-sized dosimeter on which I can check my irradiation level and which will alarm if it goes too high.
Standing on top of a nuclear reactor, casually, whilst conducting an interview, is a pinch yourself moment. We chat while staring down at the pile cap, designed as a shield, to absorb for instance, the energy from an aircraft crashing into the site. Below us is forty metres of reactor and cover. For the staff the experience is clearly everyday. At one point they say, 'Take a look at your dosimeter. It will say zero'. And it does.
What about the cracks? I ask. Forrest observes: 'For both the reactors we monitor the graphite cracks, constantly, every two months.'
Might the plant extend still longer than its new 2030 date? 'We're quite conservative in nature,' he says, 'That extension doesn't mean to say that 2030 will be the final end date. We'll continue to review. I do feel that if there is further life extension beyond 2030 it will be in the two three years kind of… It won't be five years. It will be two or three years.'
On the day of our visit, according to the National Energy System Operator, Torness, is delivering 22% of south of Scotland electricity. That's fairly common for the power station, and its fraction of the mix mostly ranges from around 10%, when only one unit is, to a quarter, with two units working, though it has been known to be as high as a startling 90%.
Every eighteen months one of the turbines is shut down for maintenance in what is called a 'scheduled outage'.
'There's two things that Torness provides,' says Forrest. 'One is straight MW. The other is inertia in the grid: stability. Our turbines spin at 3000 revs per minute and that's 50hertz. So that provides that stability and there's only so many technologies that can provide that. Coal can do it, gas can do it, nuclear can do it – but wind doesn't do that, and neither does hydro'.
There has been a great deal of talk about inertia recently. At the time of the recent outage in Spain, which left the country in blackout, it was suggested by many that 'lack of inertia' was to blame, fuelling calls for more nuclear baseload in the UK. But, actually, it turned out that Spain's outage had nothing to do with inertia and renewables, but had other causes, including the fact that some of the conventional power plants required by law to regulate the grid's voltage failed to do so.
Torness, however, is about more than the inertia or the electricity spun into existence by its magnet-twirling turbines. When I ask Paul Forrest what nuclear power means to him, he says, 'The traditional answer would probably be low carbon electricity in Scotland. But actually how I look at it it is as beautiful jobs for people. You must have seen people smiling a lot. People enjoy working here.'
One of the things that becomes apparent to me as I tour the site is that a nuclear power station is not just its infrastructure and engineering, it is also about what people call 'the Torness family', the community both working currently at the plant and in a diaspora across the nuclear world.
Torness father and son, Archie and Lewis Martin (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) What's remarkable is how many actual family relations, fathers and sons, are working on the site – from Forrest's own son, a mechanical technician, to work manager Archie Martin and his control and instrumentation engineer son Lewis. When I meet these two in the lift running up through the building to the reactor hall, Archie, who began working there in 1984, recalls standing in the lift with Margaret Thatcher when she visited the site.
'There was a big buzz about the place,' he says. 'That evening, we had a big dance in one of the construction sheds. I remember I won the big prize at the raffle, a 14 inch portable colour television from Currys.
'I remember at the time,' he recalls, it was called a job for life. It has been a job for life.'
Will it be a job for life, for Lewis who started on the apprentice scheme in 2014, thirty years 'to the day' after his dad started, he began working at the plant?
Certainly he believes, he will have ongoing work defueling the site and then opportunities within the wider nuclear industry after that.
Standing by the reactor, he explains what his job, working in robotics around the dismantling of the fuel, entails. He is involved in controlling a machine that is essentially a radiologically shielded crane which pulls out units called 'irradiated fuel assemblies', containing the spent fuel, which are then stored for sixty days before being taken to a dismantling service, and also in controlling further machinery that is used to pull the spent fuel away from a reusable plug, before ultimately it is transported, after 90 days, by truck and train to Sellafield.
Currently Torness supports an EDF staff of 520, but also the 250 workers with its main contractors, scaffolders, joiners, plumbers facilities management workers.
Torness father and son, John and Callum Gibson (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times) It's not common, says Forrest for people to leave the company, with only about 1% going elsewhere. 'When oil and gas was booming people would go to Grangemouth. What we're finding right now is people from Grangemouth are coming here after the petrochemical reprocessing plant shut down.'
The other striking thing is how long many of the older staff have worked at the site. Forrest, for instance, was there at the start of the power station, during its construction. 'Nuclear was the future wasn't it?' he says. 'And also it was just being involved in something so big.'
He is also likely to be here when the station shuts down in five years' time. If he is, it will not be the first nuclear station that Forrest has guided to its end of life. Forrest was station director on the countdown to shutdown at Hunterston B. He remembers that emotional moment, and the lead up to it, in January 2022.
'It was sad,' he recalls. 'But we had a wee saying because we were facing into it and you can't kid on that it's not going to happen, especially for the younger people there. It was, 'Respect the past but embrace the future.' I was up in the control room and we did the one, two, three and pressed the button.'
Footage from the time shows the power plant, in a landscape sprinkled with snow, release a plume of steam, the visible sign of its end. 'People,' he says, 'were in tears that day. But there's another wee emotion that kicks in. It was pride. People had been working there for one decade, two decades or four decades and they're all looking up, pride.'
'In the run up, we accepted what was going to happen and then the question then is how are we going to secure employment for the young people. That was the focus. How do we retrain, how do we redeploy? Most of the skills are similar so we've got riggers and slingers and forklift truck drivers and you need all that for decommissioning as well. Those raw skills became our focus. Ultimately, we ended up getting every single person who wanted a job got a job.'
When Forrest first took up his post at Torness, he talked staff t through what had happened at Hunterston. 'I was really proud that every single person at Hunterston who wanted a job got one. I was able to tell that story. I look people in the eye and say that. And they go okay it's not a theory or aspiration. I'll be honest and I'll say I'm not certain I'll get every single person but I'm very confident I'll get 98%. And people go right okay I understand. It's a reassurance.'
Torness apprentices, Andrew Hall (left) and Harry Bertrand (right) (Image: GordonTerris_Herald&Times)
Torness, however, doesn't feel like a place at the end of its life. It is still taking on new apprentices and host to workers in their twenties and thirties, with many decades of work ahead of them. What, I ask some of the apprentices, on the tour round the plant, do they feel about their future?
They seem highly positive. Harry Bertrand, who graduates this year from a chemistry degree apprenticeship at Torness and Andrew Hall, 22 years old, and training to be a control and instrument technician, speak with enthusiasm about what the power station had already brought them and what the future might bring.
'EDF,' says Hall, 'is like a family fleetwide. There are loads projects that the government is planning in nuclear: look at Sizewell C. It sets you up well for the future. But anyway, once the station closes, we'll have a lot of work to do. And also you can tell that you've got a quality education and training that could be transferrable anywhere.'
"It set you up well for the future," says Bertrand.
But perhaps 2030, in any case, won't be the end of nuclear. There are other suggestions, though, for a still longer life for the Torness site, one of them being that it could be home to a small modular reactor.
Forrest, however, is not getting involved in that debate. 'Right now,' he says, 'the Scottish Government policy is not supportive of new nuclear build. I love nuclear power, and the land is just outside that window there for a potential SMR, but I think we've got to be respectful of the democratically elected government.'
It's a calm and conservative answer, in keeping with the style of the place.