CLEARLY “Billy Bunter” Boris wasn’t asleep for his entire Classics class at Eton and, if he was indeed paying enough attention to mark Cincinnatus “returning to the plough”, then he also knows that 20 years later (in his late 70s) the dictator returned to save Rome.yet again So Johnson is gone today – and will hopefully stay gone tomorrow – but in his final policy act, as opposed to yesterday’s vacuous oratory, he gave the green light to a whole procession of new nuclear power stations. Thus he has left Prime Minister Truss (three words which defy belief) with the ultimate poisoned chalice – a phrase which Boris undoubtedly knows comes from the Scottish play.

In a valedictory press conference last week, Johnson poured yet more billions down the nuclear drain while failing to address the current energy crisis impacting on every family in the country.

So for two months, Johnson, the 10 Downing Street squatter, refused to act on the cost of living crisis, for fear of treading on Truss’s toes, but was perfectly willing to commit future generations to a new nuclear financial black hole. It makes no sense at all. It is Boris bonkers, not so pure and very, very simple. In the course of last week’s rambling presser, in which he advised the public to buy a new £20 kettle to save £10 on the leccy bill, Johnson had one single moment of lucidity.

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Clearly anxious to relate a fact which he had newly discovered, he told the correspondents that electricity generation from gas was nine times as expensive as offshore wind. Indeed, in best school swot fashion, he was so pleased with himself for remembering it that he repeated it to the startled journalist.

What Boris had clearly not been told is that offshore wind is also half as expensive as new nuclear and that the cost of offshore wind is declining while the cost of nuclear is rising – as it always does.

What’s wrong with nuclear is threefold. First, cost and time. Currently estimated at £100 per megawatt hour it is expensive, but that is far from the real cost or the whole story. It also requires vast Government financial guarantees just in case the nuclear flagship Sizewell C ends up like the disastrous English AGR programme of the 1980s. They ended up being more closed than open. Boris’s last-gasp nuclear dream is no solution to the present energy crisis. It will be at least 15 years before electricity from the first station of the new nuclear programme can even boil one of Boris’s magic kettles.

Second, the waste. Boris boasts that new nuclear is the best of new British technology. In fact, it is the worst of old French and Chinese technology. The French public company EDF, responsible for Sizewell, still has not solved the waste problem which has always bedevilled thermal nuclear fission, but instead is still “working on ways” to use reprocessed nuclear fuel rather than mined uranium. That’s the stuff that nuclear weapons are made from, because the civil nuclear industry is umbilically linked to the production of weapons of mass destruction and always has been.

Third, is the clear danger presented by nuclear stations. As we see only too clearly in Ukraine, nuclear power plants are not just a danger in war but a magnet for any future terrorist attack. Forty years ago, a Swiss Green politician named Chaim Nissim obtained five rocket-propelled grenades from Carlos the Jackal, and fired them at the (thankfully) empty core of Superphenix, the giant French fast reactor. The chances of such a security breach are relatively low, but the potential consequences are continental.

Instead of following England down the nuclear road to nowhere, Scottish renewables, offshore and onshore, backed up by the coming technology of clean burn green hydrogen, can produce many times our electricity needs and many times cheaper than the cost of new nuclear.

Ah, but the naysayers object. don’t we need nuclear for our base load? No is the straight answer. we don’t need our last remaining nuclear station at Torness. The world and technology has moved on in terms of intermittency on a grid and in any case one of the great virtues of offshore wind, as opposed to its onshore wee brother, is that the utilisation factor is much higher. In simple terms the wind blows nearly all the time at sea.

In addition, Scotland already has pump storage hydro stations with the new Coire Glas project in the Great Glen set to transform that capacity – effectively a giant battery ready to kick in whenever needed and smoothing out the surpluses in onshore wind. Instead of paying turbines to sit static, we can use the power to prime the pump storage capacity.

In addition to all of that, we have Peterhead as a back up if needed, a gas station which should have been converted to hydrogen power back in 2007 and must be now. There is no possible shortage of clean, green affordable power in Scotland not just for now but for the long term.

One thing is made certain from Boris’s announcement. An independent Scotland with its own electricity grid and our own public electricity company could be producing power for our people and our industry,at a bare fraction of the cost of down south. Something for Scots to think about next time we take a fearful glance at our out of control British electricity bills. And then to act accordingly.