Chamber and committees

As a member of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, I welcome the news on the proposed legislation, which is very welcome. Indeed, it is something that has been long hoped for.

Does the minister share my concern about the fact that the former Cape Marinite factory in Springburn has been in a state of chronic dereliction and abandonment for 12 years, with the result that the young people who frequently trespass on the site expose themselves to a legacy of asbestos contamination? Will she commit to working with me and Glasgow City Council to resolve the long-term dereliction of that huge industrial facility in Springburn with a view to the site undergoing some sort of regeneration?

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—

Absolutely. Inevitably, existing nuclear reactors will have to be decommissioned. That is an important part of the sector. However, we need to look at how to succeed in generating capacity in Scotland. The refusal to consider a small modular reactor at Grangemouth to power the complex, for example, left our petrochemical industry vulnerable to soaring energy costs.

The fallout of that extends far beyond energy-intensive industrial sectors such as Grangemouth; it hits communities in Ayrshire and East Lothian, where the high-quality, well-paid jobs provided by Hunterston and Torness are under threat. When we turn our backs on the nuclear sector, we tell our brightest science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, engineers, physicists and technicians that their future lies not here but overseas or south of the border; we bleed the very talent that we desperately need to build the clean industries of tomorrow.

The solution does not lie in overengineered and, frankly, obsolete designs of the past. I believe in the United Kingdom’s own Rolls-Royce small modular reactor technology, which is available today. Those reactors are roughly one third of the size of the current fleet and offer a revolutionary path forward to have more flexible load-following baseload capacity. We can repower the existing advanced gas-cooled reactor sites at Hunterston and Torness by capitalising on their established grid connections and vital cooling water infrastructure. Those SMRs are built in factories, modularly assembled and transported to sites, which drastically reduces the crippling construction delays that have plagued megaprojects such as Hinkley Point C.

That is not a hypothetical future. A European nuclear race is already under way, and Scotland is currently watching from the sidelines. Just this month, Rolls-Royce SMR secured a landmark multibillion contract to build three nuclear reactors in Sweden, following its selection by GB Energy as the preferred technology partner. Let us consider the huge scale of that untapped potential on our doorstep; we also have the capacity to build the heavy-pressure vessel fabrication and advanced modular assemblies that are needed for those reactors at the Rosyth and Govan shipyards.

If the Government dropped the ideological ban, there could be opportunities for export across the entire continent. Instead of merely exporting electricity, we could be supporting the engineering.

The ambition is written into our history. We can see it across Scotland. It is time to abandon the sunk-cost fallacy, which keeps the Government tethered to outdated dogma. Let us honour the legacy of electrical engineering in the country and integrate a modern nuclear baseload with our renewable wealth, which would unleash the industrial might of our shipbuilding capacity. We could secure an industrial future and provide clean, reliable power for generations to come.

18:25

The member might want to note the heritage of Dounreay, in his part of the world. The pioneering development there is to try to create a closed-loop zero-waste solution for nuclear, which is now in the site’s grasp, with molten-salt technology on the horizon. Using thorium, the current stock of nuclear waste could be recycled into new reactors, which presents an opportunity to solve the waste problem once and for all. Does Tim Eagle recognise that we should be at the frontier of those developments and not simply a laggard?

Yes.

David Green makes an excellent point about Dounreay, but does he recognise that one of the key advantages of repowering existing sites is that they are already connected at gigawatt scale to the national grid and that that reduces massively the costs associated with new generation?

The minister mentioned Dalzell. As the only plate mill that is left in the UK, it is critical to national infrastructure and to steel plate production for shipbuilding. We have already permanently lost the quenching and tempering facility for strengthening steel plates at Clydebridge. Given the information that Mr Rennie has supplied, will the minister make a statement in early course on what the Scottish Government intends to do to develop the Scottish steel industry?

As this is armed forces week, will the First Minister join me in congratulating all ranks of the Royal Regiment of Scotland on its 20th anniversary? Thousands of gallant young men and women from Scotland and across the Commonwealth have served in the regiment over the past two decades, with 23 paying the ultimate sacrifice for their country, including my friend Robert Hetherington. Will the Government formally recognise the regiment’s 20th anniversary? With two-thirds of Scotland’s councils having granted Scotland’s line infantry regiment the freedom of their areas, is the First Minister willing to write to the Lord Provost of Glasgow to encourage her to grant that recognition from Scotland’s largest city?

The Woodside viaducts are an oversized relic of a bygone era, and they were built far wider and taller than the traffic flow requires, as Glasgow Corporation rightly stepped in to cancel the planned Maryhill motorway in 1975. Rather than accepting a false binary of either spending a fortune to maintain a 1970s concrete scar or completely severing the trunk route, we need a solution suited to modern inner-city urbanism.

Will the minister ask Transport Scotland to formally evaluate a compromise approach to replace the obsolete viaducts with a surface-level urban boulevard, taking direct inspiration from international precedents such as San Francisco’s Embarcadero and New York’s Sheridan Boulevard?

Since the rates revaluation, one hospitality business in Glasgow has had a rateable value increase of 250 per cent, from £0.5 million to over £1.3 million. That is obviously ludicrous, and the business is now shelving a plan for a £25 million expansion, with more than 100 job opportunities lost.

This particular case shows that the sharp rates increase has led to the stalling of capital investment and the pausing of new hires—all things that Glasgow needs if it is to remain competitive with other major UK cities. Despite backing Labour’s amendment in the taxation debate just a few weeks ago, the Government has, at best, kicked fresh start relief for new businesses into touch. That is not the fundamental reform that we were promised and which we need.

In her statement, the Deputy First Minister also promised an improvement to the appeals process. What reassurance and support will she give businesses affected by these extreme rate rises that their appeals will be held in a timely manner before they go under?