WHATEVER else yesterday's announcement on Dounreay signified, it represented a personal victory for Mrs Lorraine Mann, convener of Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping.

Dounreay has had many critics, but none more effective or persuasive than Mrs Mann.

A member of no political party, she even won praise from the Secretary of State for conceding that nuclear fuel was safer in Dounreay than in a car boot sale in Georgia, although she never agreed it should be reprocessed.

The idea of commercial reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from other countries and elsewhere in the UK has always been the single most offensive aspect of Dounreay's operation to her, and one she has long argued made no economic sense.

Dounreay had poured scorn on these arguments, insisting that such contracts would make money, but yesterday Mrs Mann appeared vindicated by Minister John Battle.

She was obviously delighted with the news yesterday, but made clear that she would still be watching Dounreay.

Growing up in the Edinburgh suburb of Corstorphine, she remembers the Cuban missile crisis and, more particularly, parents saying they would kill their children rather than see them die slowly from radiation sickness. She began reading about nuclear matters and has never stopped.

She moved to the Highlands as a primary school teacher, married and set up home near Fearn in Easter Ross.

Some 13 years ago, she was at a mother and toddlers' group in Invergordon when a friend said that she had read an article about nuclear waste coming through Invergordon bound for Dounreay. ''We both said somebody should do something''.

She was to do something a year later, appearing as a lay objector during the 94-day public inquiry in 1986 into the proposal to establish a European Demonstration Reprocessing Plant at Dounreay.

The EDRP never came but the next thing which appeared over the horizon was the proposal to establish the UK's first national nuclear waste repository, courtesy of Nirex.

Around 90% of the UK's nuclear waste was generated furth of Scotland, but in 1987 the then Tory Government announced that it was abandoning plans to establish the repository in one of four English rural areas.

All four were in Tory held seats, three of which were held by Government Ministers. Their backyards were kept clean.

Sellafield and Dounreay were then put in the Nirex frame. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mrs Mann established herself as the leading figure of the ultimately successful campaign against Nirex coming to Caithness.

She formed a firm relationship not only with Highland Regional Council, which also opposed Nirex, but also with the media in the Highlands and Islands.

''Tell me when I have ever knowingly misled or lied to you and can you say the same about Dounreay?'' she used to ask, and the question was not difficult to answer.

Away from matters nuclear, she will be remembered as the person who embarrassed George Robertson in the ''Great Debate'' by asking him and Alex Salmond what their second constitutional choice would be, but she never was a SNP stooge as some in Labour insisted at the time. She is nobody's stooge.