Meeting of the Parliament 24 June 2026 [Draft]
I thank Liam Kerr, who is a member for North East Scotland, for lodging this motion for members’ business, which I was pleased to sign.
Scotland gave the world the compound steam engine, the foundations of thermodynamics and the pioneering brilliance of figures such as Sir Samuel Curran and Nobel prize winner C T R Wilson, whose invention of the cloud chamber allowed humanity to see subatomic particles for the first time, and it was at the University of Glasgow that another Nobel prize winner, Frederick Soddy, formulated the concept of isotopes, which unlocked the fundamental chemistry required for nuclear fuel. The atomic age was built in no small part due to Scottish laboratories and research, yet we stand today at a crossroads where our reputation as a global engineering powerhouse is being sabotaged by political ignorance.
For too long, the debate that surrounds our energy future has been clouded by an ideological opposition to nuclear power that ignores basic engineering principles and our own successful history. We are told that we must choose between a renewable future and a nuclear one, but I believe that to be a false dichotomy. If we are to truly become a clean energy superpower, we must recognise that wind and nuclear are not rivals but essential partners in a reliable and optimal energy system.
The figures speak for themselves. Scotland’s unique environment is perfectly suited for wind and tidal power, yet wind technology is available only between 25 and 45 per cent of the time. To maintain a stable grid with firm power, we require 90 per cent firm power supply, which is exactly what nuclear energy provides. We cannot legislate for the weather, so when high-pressure systems settle over the North Sea and plunge us into a wind drought, no amount of installed turbine capacity will generate a single watt of electricity.
Furthermore, a stable electricity grid requires physical inertia—the heavy, spinning mass that traditional thermal generation provides—to maintain frequency and prevent blackouts. Without that stable, firm power, Scotland, which was once a leading exporter of secure, low-cost power, is now frequently reduced to importing electricity from English power stations on calm days just to keep the lights on.
This is not a new frontier for us; it is our heritage. Chapelcross opened in 1959 as one of the world’s first civil nuclear power stations, and it provided secure, uninterrupted baseload electricity to the grid for more than four decades. The late Sir Donald Miller, the visionary electrical engineer who designed our post-war electricity system, expanded that legacy of reliability. He warned that decommissioning our nuclear generating capacity without replacement would leave us with the least reliable and most insecure electricity supply in our country for a century.
Under Sir Donald’s leadership in the early 1990s, Scotland enjoyed a system where 60 per cent of our energy was generated by nuclear power, making it one of the greenest and most cost-effective electricity systems in the world. Today, that legacy is being dismantled. By refusing to support a new generation of reactors, we are not only losing energy security but exporting highly skilled jobs and billions of pounds in potential investment. We see the consequences of that at Grangemouth—