NUCLEAR REACTION
Power station is still a talking point 30 years after it closed
LYING just off the A470 north of Bronaber and Dolgellau, Trawsfynydd is in many ways a typical Welsh village. There are less than 1,000 people living there; it has a grocery shop, a pub, a newsagent, a chemist, garage, petrol service station and a host of agricultural merchants.
But looming on its skyline is a sight familiar to many who have passed through in the past 50 years or so: the twin reactors of Trawsfynydd nuclear power station. Since construction of the plant began in July 1959, before its opening in 1965, it has shaped the economy of the surrounding area, even since it was shut 30 years ago.
For more than 20 years the site employed people from the village itself, Blaenau Ffestiniog and beyond. It has continued to employ hundreds in the years since it closed and its future use has been a continuous topic of debate.
Set against the backdrop of the decline of traditional mining and slating industries in areas like Blaenau Ffestiniog, the arrival of Trawsfynydd in the late 1950s offered the potential of high wages and work to many who were struggling.
Meilyr Tomos lives in nearby Dolgellau. He had family and friends who were employed in the power station when it opened and, as a child, remembers how significant it was.
“It was quite a unique thing to put something like that in the middle of nowhere,” he said.
“It was just an enormous place and offered all sorts of employment to people, but that would have been the case for whatever industry or company came in. What you had was a rural workforce and community which was transformed by the nuclear power plant. There was a huge need for employment at the time, certainly.”
But despite its job opportunities, Trawsfynydd was not welcomed by all and there were concerns around safety and pollution given the type of industry involved.
Deilwen Evans is part of the antinuclear group CADNO. She said: “There was lots of demand for work outside agriculture at the time, and that was always the dilemma. [You had] people in the agricultural industry who were fearful of pollution, but those who wanted to work were in favour of it.”
For more than 20 years workers passed in and out of the power station, which is estimated to have employed around 600 people at its peak.
Brian Cook remembers growing up in the area and has close family ties to the station.
“My grandfather and father both worked as labourers during the early Sixties, on both the main building and the nearby Maentwrog Dam,” he remembered.
“Sadly, dad died in 1962, a few months after mam, and the workers at Traws were very good and held raffles and dances to raise money for the six orphans. It got national press coverage at the time. I can remember being taken for a trip by the workers to the site and being amazed at all the big machines. It was an exciting time that all this modern technology was coming to Meirionydd.
“And of course there were the big wages.”
Today, Trawsfynydd has been in the decommissioning process for longer than it was open. Since closing in 1991 it has continued to bring employment to the region and there have been plans mooted for its future. Last year it was revealed that RollsRoyce were interested in building a network of mini-reactors on the site, and there have been talks of a possible small nuclear reactor (SMR) site there since 2015.
In July 2020, Trawsfynydd was chosen to be part of a decommissioning programme which will see its twin reactors fully demolished while a new low-level radioactive waste store is built on the site to hold the material. The programme means that the decommissioning of the station, which hadn’t been expected to be completed until around 2083, will be brought forward and will see contin
ued employment on the site for the next 20 years.
Angharad Rayner, Trawsfynydd site director, said at the time that the development could “secure employment for the next two decades and could lead to further opportunities for local people in the future”.
While Trawsfynydd is managed by Magnox Ltd, a subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which was set up by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Wales too has been exploring options for its future. Last October the Welsh Government set up a company to explore options for developing the site, and Minister for Economy and North Wales, Ken Skates, said there was “huge potential for the development of small modular reactor technologies at Trawsfynydd”.
But North Wales has not been immune from controversies surrounding nuclear sites. Despite being more than 2,000 miles away, farms over 53,000 hectares in North Wales felt the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, with many restrictions placed on them due to radioactive particles in the soil and vegetation. This threatened livelihoods across the country and some restrictions in areas like Snowdonia were only lifted as recently as 2012.
In 2015 new research by Dr Chris Busby, who used to be based in Aberystwyth, claimed that the incidence of breast cancer was five times higher downwind from Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station than would have been expected. Some other cancers were found at around double the expected rate.
A spokesperson from Magnox said at the time that radiation exposures of the station’s workforce and that of the general public from authorised discharges from the nuclear industry “are well below the maximum levels authorised by independent regulatory bodies”.
Public Health England said at the time that “identification of disease clusters are matters for local public health teams” and Public Health Wales said there were no ongoing investigations into cancer clusters in the Trawsfynydd area, but that public health teams “would investigate any concerns about a number of people in the same area with the same disease.
“There are robust processes and procedures in place to investigate such concerns,” it added.
CADNO member Deilwen Evans said she had always had concerns around the safety of nuclear sites, although no link has ever been confirmed.
“There were certainly some illnesses that weren’t prevalent in the area before, but it is always difficult to prove any link,” she said.
“There were reports of high cancer rates in the area. We were always suspicious, but nothing was ever proven.”
A stakeholder group meeting by the site closure team in July 2020, showed 195 people were employed at Trawsfynydd. This included 139 Magnox staff on-site, 43 agency-supplied workers and 13 contractors.
But views on how much the region has benefited have been mixed.
Meilyr Tomos felt the economic effects had not been as long-lasting as others believed.
“A few years ago the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation found that there were two wards in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area, only a spitting distance from the power station, that were among the most deprived areas in Wales,” he said.
“Hundreds were employed at the time, but those areas have remained deprived, so I don’t know how much it adds up really.”
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are faster to build than large nuclear power plants as they are constructed off-site and then assembled at the locations as required. And Meilyr thinks this means there is not the same level of employment opportunities.
“The first site employed so many people, but with SMRs there is not the same level of employment capacity. With full sites there are huge construction opportunities at the start when they’re being built. But with SMRs they come off the back of a lorry, of course you will have jobs needed still, but not to the same level.”
Meilyr is against further development of reactors on the site but said this had often been mistaken for hostility towards those who had worked there.
“What has always been uncomfortable for me is that we’ve almost been pitted against the workforce of these power stations.
“It has never been the case that I’ve had anything against them. In fact I have always been very grateful to the workers who have kept it safe over so many years.”
Brian Cook thinks a mini-power station would bring much-needed prosperity to the area.
“The main Traws site I think should be decommissioned as soon as possible and the main building kept as a reference to the history of the area. The network infrastructure is still there and its use by small modular reactors has to be the future. Closing Traws took the heart out of the area and some very skilled people were thrown on the dole and the future of many was destroyed.
“We need these projects in northwest Wales and not rely on the false economy of tourism, which is killing our language and heritage.”
Deilwen Evans said that while Trawsfynydd did bring jobs, the longterm impact had not been transformative.
“It’s the boom and bust thing, isn’t it – before Trawsfynydd there were lots of other industries and small services in the area, but the station offered wages much higher than the average there at the time, so people went there. But when it closed those old industries weren’t there any more to come back to. In a way it damaged the chances of getting continuous work after.”