NIGG RESIDENTS IN FOR A SHOCK!

NEVER MIND THE BUZZ COCKS, NEVER MIND THE WIND FARMS. INSTEAD CONCENTRATE ON THE DECOMMISSIONING OF RADIO ACTIVE MATERIAL!

GOOGLE EARTH

For people like me who trawl the ‘net’ on an almost nightly basis finding hidden gems can be very exciting. Its not necessary to find a lost Pearl hidden in a buried casket or even a bathing beauty on a beach in Bermuda, but rather commercial info that can reveal lots of hidden ‘treasures to come’.

Such was my luck the other night when as I was trying to identify likely sites on Google Earth for the inevitable construction of Nuclear electricity stations, needed to satisfy the ever growing demand for power by the British Public, I stumbled across quite a revealing piece of knowledge.

Regular readers will recall some time back when your editor raised the idea that waste radio active material could be entrained at the Evanton Deephaven Facility destined for a reprocessing plant elsewhere, the whole idea was ridiculed by the now SNP MSP Rob Gibson. The spur rail link idea for the Evanton development seems to have faded, perhaps in favour of a more suitable site to construct a spur rail link elsewhere. Will Mr Gibson still refute that we in Easter Ross are facing the decommission of radio active material on a big scale? If that brave MSP would like further enlightenment he should read the ‘Highlander’ more often.
The debacle that the town of Invergordon has become, is partly, or even largely, due to the lack of proper public consultation when Quangos make decisions and then foist them on what is at times, I regret to say, is a very gullible General Public.

Now take the case of the pending departure of the Cromarty Firth Port Authority’s operations from the harbour frontage at Invergordon to the Nigg Dry Dock. What public consultation has gone into this proposal? Very little I may add but that is ‘by the by’, or if you are a cricket fan, a leg bye and a very deliberate one at that. At this stage I do not wish to bore readers by itemising the phenomenal grants of public money heaped upon the various operators at Nigg by RACE and HIE, including the present ‘occupant’ but let me say they were considerable and quite mouth-watering.

Nor let us not forget the public money heaped on Forscot Ltd. at Alness point, so in the forthcoming age of the Avian Bird Flu, I suggest we are looking at a very ‘lame, if not an already dead, or perhaps even a decoy duck’. What then, one is tempted to ask, is the real reason behind this pathetic attempt by the authorities to provide a smoke screen for what is more than likely going to happen on the shores, both north and south, of the Cromarty Firth?

Way back in 1951 when I was conscripted into the army the instructors on the firing range emphasised time and again, when handing out live ammo, that ‘a little knowledge was dangerous’ and we rookies had very little knowledge indeed. I’m happy to say that none of the squad were ‘shot in the foot’ either by design or accident. That adage is as relevant today as it was then and the powers that be (RACE, HIE and Highland Council or even the Scottish Executive) by providing the General Public with only a ‘little knowledge’ may face a backlash of public opinion that opinion that will will prove very dangerous indeed and may well forestall the fait accompli that some individuals, and possibly the Establishment, are attempting to foist upon us—‘the gullible public’. Hopefully by their lack of Openness and Accountability and their erroneous belief that they have sufficient knowledge to fool us all, the authorities will shoot themselves in their collective foot and ‘Truth will out’.

I can sense by now that readers are be becoming a bit bemused, rather than amused, by my literary meandering and so I suppose I should provide some relevant facts.