YOU may want a “nuclear-free” Scotland. And if you saw those recent pictures of live nuclear missiles being delicately transported from Devonport to Faslane, by means of a khaki-wrapped wagon-trail barrelling down one side of a dual carriageway, you might imagine exactly how to achieve it.

But the nuclear age always had its banal, civilian side in this country, as it generated our public electricity supply. (And it wasn’t entirely civilian either: weapons-grade plutonium was produced at reactor sites like Chapelcross).

The Scottish Government’s most recent compendium of energy statistics reveals, rather startlingly, that nuclear power is only second (28%) to wind (39.9%) as a producer of electricity in Scotland. The Torness and Hunterston B stations are also the largest sources of “non-intermittent supply” (ie, they keep going when the renewables becalm themselves), producing 2.2 gigawatts in 2019/20.

It’s chastening. Even though the nuclear percentage is on a long-term decline, a decent chunk of our electrical civilisation in Scotland is still defined by two contrasting symbols.

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One atomic icon shows electrons spinning round their nucleus, in a benign and orderly way. The other one is the black and yellow “trefoil”. This design dramatises the radiation of harm, damage and death to nearby humans.

Last week brought news that marched under each of these icons. Thursday was the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, where a combination of natural disaster and ill-preparedness cracked open three reactors on the island. The partial meltdowns evacuated 165,000 people, leaving conditions still too dangerous for 50,000 of them to return.

And on the same day, the investigation site The Ferret revealed that two deactivated reactor sites, Dounreay in Caithness and Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway, are preparing their bids to build the world’s first “fusion” nuclear reactor, as planned by the UK Government.

Ah, fusion! “Clean” nuclear energy, goes the story. Much fewer amounts of radioactive waste than “fission”. Zero chance of meltdown (just a rapid “cooldown”, apparently). The dream of harnessed subatomic energy revived. All your devices humming and glowing happily into the future, with no dread prospect of rationing or change of usage. No carbon emissions, as the mighty atom obediently and safely serves us.

Hurrah! And stick a Jack on that, too!

Haud on. The more you investigate the science of nuclear fusion – a hundred years old, and still not that much nearer to being practically useful – the more you realise that it’s exactly the kind of near-fantasy project that rah-rah Brexitannics love to promote, seeking their monthly quota of distracting feel-good headlines.

There’s one show-stopping realisation about nuclear fusion.

This rests on the overall truth that what it tries to do is to simulate the way stars produce energy – by “fusing” the nuclei of atoms, under great heat and containment – down here on Earth.

Yet the “daft laddie” question might be: why try to simulate the inner workings of the sun, when – externally – it showers our Earth with enough raw energy, and sustains enough natural flows, to power our existing civilisation many times over? The International Energy Agency noted in October last year that solar was now cheaper than coal and that renewable sources would be the largest single source of electricity globally by 2025 (their graph just accelerates upwards).

One of the many reasons that big capital is disinvesting from fossil fuels, regarding them as soon-to-be “stranded assets”, is that the business prospects of a renewable revolution are so lush.

This isn’t just because the build-out of renewable infrastructure has produced low prices – but that there’s such an abundance of green build-out to come. Much of this will be about smart grids, transport and eco-monitoring solutions, local retrofitting of housing and infrastructure, new post-consumerist markets and lifestyles … It’s a plethora of enterprise, social and private, demanding capitalisation.

Given this society-wide impetus, and with the eco-ambitions of Joe Biden’s America and Xi Jinping’s China providing the leadership and governance, why would you waste any money and time on the “magic bullet” of this form of nuclear power? A form that is, in any case, notoriously difficult to achieve?

And when you look at the core science, it really is fiendishly hard. Deuterium and tritium have to be heated to 100 million degrees Celsius – 10 times hotter than the Sun – until their fusion emits a plasma (made up from electrons escaping from their nuclei and floating around).

This plasma is held in place by magnets and hovers around the middle of a doughnut-shaped reactor, not touching the sides. The heat generated by all this, as in fission reactors, will produce the power.

Yet in tests, this plasma behaves unpredictably, and so the physical design of the reactors containing it look mighty strange (and sound it too: one form is called a tokamak, the other a stellarator. If you need a Saturday geek-out, find them on an image search – they’re like discarded sets from Aliens or Prometheus).

The UK Government proposals seem to have faith that something can happen here that’s never sustainedly happened before. Which is that the amount of energy generated surpasses the amount of energy it takes to fuse the elements in the first place. The very point of a nuclear power plant, no?

AGAIN, it’s about our pressing priorities, especially those determined by climate crisis. My Common Weal colleague, the laser physicist Dr Craig Dalzell (lasers are a big part of the fusion process), made it starkly clear to me.

“We have nine years left to start making major changes [to our energy generation and consumption] and 24 to complete them. We don’t have time to get fusion up and running and then scaled up to meet demand … We can look at fusion in earnest after 2045. Displacing development money now could be catastrophic. Fusion is like building a new extension to the house while the roof has a hole in it.”

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So what about when renewables sputter and fail? Where is our “baseload” supply? Many eco-experts would reply that we should be using solid batteries (and watery ones, like pump reservoirs), along with highly-smart grids – as well as a more generally resilient energy mindset in our communities – to get us over any power lulls from wind, wave and sun.

Indeed, Craig informs me that Scotland hosted a world-first last November. Scottish Power Renewables performed a “black start” on a disempowered section of the electricity grid at the Dersalloch wind farm. They used “virtual synchronous machines (VSM) to regulate the frequency and voltage of the power from the turbines, stabilising the island network”.

No coal, oil, gas or nukes on tap – the usual way to cover a blackout – were required.

To prefer a robustly and smartly decentralised energy system, over the brittle and centralised option implied by nuclear facilities, is also a choice about social and cultural values. Political power should be as diffuse and broadly generated as energy power. The ideal would be that they are woven together (Germany’s localised renewables revolution is a great exemplar).

Scotland knows what to do with nucleated material in bombs (we order them off the territory) and in old fission plants (we carefully and responsibly decommission them). But we don’t need to make this stuff into stars on Earth – at least not now. Let’s avoid the eco-horror story first, before we embark on the space opera.