Ed Miliband’s flagship green energy cable to Orkney is being sold as a clean power lifeline, yet the route it must take cuts straight through some of the most contaminated seabed in Britain. The risk is not abstract: disturbing historic nuclear and wartime debris could lift radioactive particles into currents that wash directly onto Orkney’s beaches and into its fishing grounds. I want to look at how a project framed as climate progress has collided with a legacy of nuclear waste and whether ministers are being honest about the trade offs.
The cable, the minister and a contaminated coastline
The new subsea link is part of a wider push by Jan’s government to unlock renewable power from the islands and move it to the mainland grid, with Ed Miliband positioned as the political face of that transition. The proposed route would connect Orkney to the north of Scotland, running close to the Dounreay nuclear power plant site where radioactive material has been found in the seabed over many years, raising fears that trenching and ploughing for the cable could stir up particles that have largely lain undisturbed. Reporting on the project has already warned that this “green” infrastructure could spread nuclear waste across the pristine beaches of Orkney if sediment is mobilised in the wrong conditions, a risk that critics argue has not been fully confronted in public.
Those concerns are sharpened by the fact that the Dounreay area has a long record of contamination incidents and complex clean up operations, with the seabed around the former plant known to contain radioactive fragments that are difficult to track and remove. One detailed account notes that the Dounreay nuclear power plant has left material embedded in the marine environment in ways that could complicate any possible clean up operation if construction work disturbs it, a point that sits uneasily beside the government’s rhetoric about a simple, low impact cable installation along the seabed. The tension between the promise of clean energy and the reality of a dirty legacy is already defining the politics of this project.
World War Two relics and a warning from Caithness
If that sounds theoretical, the experience on the Caithness coast shows how quickly buried hazards can derail energy infrastructure. Work on a high voltage electricity substation between Caithness and Orkney was halted after radiation was detected in soil that had been excavated from the site, with investigators concluding that the source was aircraft instruments discarded in World War Two rather than modern nuclear waste. Regulators required a permit under the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018 once the contamination was confirmed, underlining how even historic military debris can trigger strict controls when it is brought back to the surface during construction.
The episode has already raised questions about how carefully contractors are handling material along this corridor. Excavation material from the Caithness substation site was taken away before traces of radioactivity were publicly confirmed, with local reporting noting that this happened when no specific controls were in place at the time, a sequence that understandably alarmed nearby communities. A separate account records that SSEN Transmission notified authorities of suspected radium 226 during preparatory groundwork for the connection that will link Orkney to the mainland for the first time, a reminder that the risks here are not hypothetical modelling exercises but live operational problems on the very projects meant to carry Orkney’s green power south.
Official backing and the pressure of net zero deadlines
Despite these warning signs, the political momentum behind the Orkney link is formidable. In a written statement to the House, The Minister for Energy, Michael Shanks, said the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero intends to back the SSEN Transmission Orkney Link so that renewable electricity from the islands can be exported to the GB transmission grid, signalling that ministers see this as a strategic national asset rather than a discretionary local scheme. That endorsement places heavy pressure on regulators and developers to find a way through the contamination issues without derailing the timetable that Miliband and his colleagues have set for expanding the grid.
The wider context is a system already struggling to keep pace with climate targets. Earlier this month, Miliband’s own energy tsar acknowledged that the vast majority of grid projects being tracked are delayed years beyond their planned construction date and highlighted the £1.1 Sea Link project as an example of the scale and cost of the upgrades required to meet demand. Against that backdrop, the Orkney cable is not just another regional line on a map but part of a national scramble to build enough capacity fast enough, a scramble that can tempt decision makers to downplay messy complications like nuclear waste in the seabed.
Local backlash and a growing revolt against Miliband’s cables
On the ground, opposition is hardening as more details of the route and its risks emerge. Multiple reports have described how a green energy sea cable project overseen by Ed Miliband risks spreading nuclear waste across Orkney, with residents and campaigners warning that the islands are being treated as a sacrifice zone for the mainland’s energy needs. One widely shared post accused Miliband of pushing ahead with a sea cable that could contaminate Orkney’s environment, reflecting a sense among some locals that they are being asked to shoulder disproportionate environmental and safety burdens in the name of national climate goals.
Those anxieties are now feeding into a broader political backlash. At a public inquiry into a separate Borders energy park, critics cited Miliband’s green energy sea cable and the threat to Orkney as evidence that communities are not being properly informed about the consequences of large scale grid projects, with Graham Simpson, a Reform MSP for the central belt, arguing that people across Scotland need to know about this before more cables are approved. Another analysis of the controversy noted that Miliband’s sea cable risks spreading nuclear waste across Orkney and quoted Jacob Freedland, who set out concerns about how disturbance of contaminated seabed could send radioactive particles towards beaches and fisheries, a scenario that would be politically explosive as well as environmentally damaging.
Britain’s cable blitz and the forgotten nuclear clean up
The Orkney row is also a microcosm of a much larger shift in how Britain uses its coastal waters. Miliband is driving a wind blitz that will blanket Britain’s coastline with cables, with developers needing to rip up farmland, beaches and sections of the seabed to connect offshore turbines to the onshore grid, a transformation that is already provoking resistance in coastal communities. The Orkney link sits squarely within that pattern, raising the question of how many more times construction teams will encounter buried contamination, unexploded ordnance or fragile ecosystems as they carve new corridors through the marine environment.
At the same time, the country is still grappling with the legacy of its first nuclear era. Most at risk areas around historic nuclear sites are not accessible to the public, according to guidance from Nuclear Restoration Services, which stresses that restrictions are designed to protect nearby residents, businesses and households for good while long term clean up continues. That approach assumes a relatively static landscape, yet the rush to lay new energy cables is anything but static, and the Orkney project shows how easily those carefully managed exclusion zones can be disrupted by infrastructure that was never imagined when the original contamination occurred.
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