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Lately there has been a mounting noise on behalf of more nuclear power in Scotland, pleas for John Swinney to do a u-turn on his ruling out of new nuclear reactors.

For the Herald’s recent Torness series, I covered the calls by campaign group Britain Remade for a new small modular reactor to be built on the site of Scotland’s only working power station which is set to be shut down in five years.

“Scotland, a country with a proud nuclear heritage, “said Britain Remade founder Sam Richards, a former Boris Johnson advisor, “ should be looking to build a next generation of reactors.”

Calls for Scotland to embrace nuclear have been greeted with a certain amount of enthusiasm in some quarters, including many SNP voters. But what troubles me, in the current debate, is that all too often it feels like we are stuck in an old vision of the grid – and one of the terms that suggests this is ‘baseload’.

Baseload is defined as the minimum amount of electricity required by a grid to meet the continuous demand for power over a day. Currently, it’s mostly used to refer to the generating capacity that we need to always be there if the wind stops and the sun doesn’t shine.

Britain Remade, for instance, talks about nuclear in terms of “clean, reliable baseload power”.

But what if nuclear is actually a technology that does not suit a modern renewable grid? What if wind and nuclear are not good bedfellows and, as a baseload, new plants will only make our electricity more expensive?

In a recent Substack, David Toke, author of Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy, described the “accepted truth” in the media that new nuclear power is needed because there is no other practical or cheaper way to balance fluctuating wind and solar power, as “demonstrably false”.

He said it “runs counter to the way that the UK electricity grid is going to be balanced anyway” – which, he noted, is by gas engines and turbines “that are hardly ever used”. Simple gas fired power plants, he said, are many times cheaper per MW compared to nuclear power plant.

Toke advocated for a system........

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