 IT was September 1978, somewhere between the heyday of punk and the Ghost Town years. at Torness in East Lothian, a group of 400 protesters had gathered to demonstrate against the nuclear power station planned by the South of Scotland Electricity Board. The site at that stage had just a big pit in its middle, so scores of them began jumping in to halt the diggers.  a founder member of the so-called Torness alliance, Pete Roche, was there that day. He recalls it was the latest step in a concerted campaign against the station. a hardcore of 25 alliance members had commandeered a ruined cottage on the site a few weeks earlier and had been renovating it to create an obstruction.  The nuclear plant builders had bulldozed it the week before. Scotland s fledgling anti-nuclear faction had been so incensed that it had answered the call from all over the country to get down there and demonstrate in the pit.  It felt like we were inventing the anti-nuclear movement at the time,  says Roche.  The alliance had had good relations with the police, but now conflict was inevitable, with large numbers being arrested.  This was the start of the environmental movement that blossomed in the 1980s to become perhaps second only to the miners in the prominence of its conflicts with the Thatcher Government.  Roche remembers clambering over the Torness fences a few months later beside a young Robin Cook as they argued about whether the new Tory Government would make any difference. Cook shouted back that nothing would be the same again.  Roche believes these protests played their part in killing the UK nuclear construction programme, along with the fact that the economics of nuclear electricity simply didn t stack up next to burning coal or gas.  By the time Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the game was already almost up. The only new stations after that had already been years in the pipeline. Torness opened in 1988 and remains the last Scottish station to have been built.  The world has moved on since then, with many mainstream politicians now ready to consider a new generation of nuclear stations. There aren t many in the SNP, however, which remains firmly against. To the great irritation of successive Westminster Governments, it has used planning law to impose its will and get around the fact that energy policy is supposed to be reserved.  Those in favour of nuclear power have long argued it is the only low-carbon solution to the fact that the current generation of power stations will soon need to be replaced, starting with Hunterston B, Scotland s other nuclear plant, in 2016. Since wind turbines produce no power on still days, they say, we ll need new nuclear base-load to 