He Chairman of British Aluminium Blamed the Closure Squarely On
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- he Chairman of British Aluminium yest ~rday blamed the closure squarely on high power costs . ....... Contents -------Comment______ _ lnvergordon and Nukes 3 News 4-5 Waste Dumping - final? 6 Energy Politics Namibia and RTZ 7 PWR's and Sizewell 8-9 The closure of the aluminium smelter at lnvergordon shows that economics Consumer Campaign 10 and energy policy are Intimately linked. The energy policy of the current Govern ment Is based on the economics of unemployment. An energy policy which is Insulation Programme 11 inflationary can only lead to increased hardship for low Income groups. Appropriate Tech- 12-13 This Issue of the Energy ISulletin Is all about the· worst effects of such a policy, nology which spreads to the Third World, creating a poverty trap In places like Namibia [see page 7]. Reviews 14 The intransigent policies of this Government blunder onward, with the pro SCRAM 15 posed Pressurised Water Reactor at Slzewell in East Anglia raising Its ugly head Little Black Rabbit 16 [see pages 8 & 9]. And yet a coherent and humane energy strategy Is staring us Copy date for next issue: in _the face. An energy conservation programme, If Initiated, would Immediately Friday, February 26th, 1982. create thousands of Jo~s, save our oil reserves and eliminate the need for expen sive and dangerous nuclear power stations; and give us the breathing space to HELP! develop an alternative energy strategy [see page 11]. The weather hasn't smiled on the Smi The Combined H.eat and Power feasibility study of Atklns and Partners is ex ling Sun Shop. On Thursday, January 14th, pected in mid February. The Government seems to be considering a feeble pro the thaw burst a water tank in the flat up gramme of one or two 'lead cities' in this CHP study. What the nine lead city stairs, and the result was that a large part of the ceiling in the shop's storeroom came contenders need is a total commitment, and the cancellation of the Torness, Hey down. Donations to help us get replace sham and Sizewell projects. ment stock in quickly would be much appreciated- as would a new carpet! We apologise for any delays in the mail order service over the past few weeks - we will be advising the people upstairs on proper insulation to stop it happening again! SUBSCRIBE TO THIS MAGAZINE NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION The cost of subscription to this magazine has now been inpreased due to in day workshop creased production and distribution costs. The cover price has also gone up from There will be a day-workshop in 30p to 40p - a figure more in line with other similar journals and magazines. 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Date ...........••....•..• Hamilton Place, Edinburgh 3. 031-225- Affiliation. Groups and organisations are 4950. invited to send for an Affiliation form 0. SCRAM Energy Bulletin Feb/Mar '82 3 lands, but has also left the SSEB with a lot of egg on its face. lt's already well-known that the SSEB has an embarassing overcapacity of gen erating plant. In 1980/81 they had equip ment installed to generate 9564 mega Aluminium watts. Their all-time peak demand for elec tricity (in February 1979) was 5517 MW including the 250 MW taken by the smel ter. Thus without the smelter, but assum ing that the Board still doesn't adopt in Foiled dustrial pricing policies which could curb the rare "spikes" of peak demand, they have an overcapacity of 81%. Shutting both Hunterston nukes tomorrow would The sorry history of the lnvergordon aluminium smelter project charts the leave a very comfortable 24% overcapa slide i.nto nightmare of the "white heat of technology" dreams held by planners city. In the Sixties. Nuclear power would provide vast quantities Cff cheap and relia This is bad enough - and expensive ble electricity, government would set up large Investment schemes in "remote" enough for the Scottish consumer - but it [le. remote from Whitehall) areas, the economrwould boom. Particularly, al is perhaps not the most significant point for uminium smelters and nuclear power were used to justify each other, as at Wylfa nuclear plans. Nuclear power stations are on Angelsey and with the deal between British Aluminium and the SSEB over notoriously inflexible- it can take days to the building of the Hunters ton B Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor. start one up from cold. Sa they tend to be run 24 hours a day between fuelling (or lt was the reality of nuclear power - expensive and unreliable - which breakdowns!), contributing what is called brought the dreamers down to earth with a bump, and with disastrous conse "baseload power". quences for the Highlands. But, as Pete Roche and Mike Holderness explain The SSEB didn't produce figures for below, the consequences go much further. They make the case for abandoning their baseload demand - effectively the Torness now stronger than it's ever been. amount of electricity used at five in the morning - before we went to press. A reasonable estimate would be 40% or less of their peak demand - maybe 2200 MW The long-running saga involving both But the company held out for a similar in winter with lnvergordon, certainly less Scottish Electricity Boards and British subsidy right through to the year 2000 - than 2000 MW in winter without, and per Aluminium has finally ended with the clo which would have cost the taxpayer a fur haps 1000 MW on summer nights. sure of the aluminium smelter at lnver ther £288M, because the promise of cheap But if Torness was finished the SSEB's gordon, at a cost to the taxpayer of £113 electricity from Hunterston had not been nuclear capacity (usable only for baseload) m i 11 ion. The loss of 890 jobs is disastrous in realised. would be 2730 MW - in other words, an area where there is little prospect of they'd have to keep a large part of their further employment. However the story is nuclear plant shut down even in winter, not yet completely over, and the knock-on and only ever use coal-fired plant in the effect throughout the Scottish economy More Jobs at Risk daytime. may cause further redundancies. The SSEB has lost, at a stroke, 7.5 per We can expect them to produce a spate The lnvergordon smelter was one of the cent of its sales. This will probably mean of advertising for night-storage heaters main empJoyers in the Highland Region that the Board will make even less use of and the like to try to sell themselves out of and Scotland's biggest single electricity its coal and oil-fired power stations. ln this fix. user. The smelter came into operation in verkip, an oil-fired station which was only 1972 and has used almost a quarter of the opened 2 years ago at a cost of £140M and North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board's the Kincardine coal-fired station are the entire output since 1974. most vulnerable. Already two of lover British Aluminium contributed. to the kip's three generators are mothballed and establishment of Hunterston B nuclear the plant's output has been as low as 5% of power station.