Is Nuclear Power As Washed Out As Carnsore ?

Jeremy Bugler examines the government's White Paper on energy and other recent public stories.

ENERGY-IRELAND is what we have been waiting for: the neatest all-between-one-cover statement of how the Government sees Ireland's crucial energy problem. Until now, the public had to sketch in official policy by marrying something Des O'Malley told the Sarsfield Cumann to something he muttered in the Dail and then to add in a fevered declaration from an ESB man just back from a Euratom meeting in Brussels. Inevitably, this I left dark corners.

But now we have it and Energy-Ireland (subtitled Discussion document on some current energy problems and options) has the merit of being written in a crisp, clear style.

We know now how the Government thinks on energy. The great American journalist, H. L. Mencken, once describbed a colleague as having "A narrow mind closing steadily all the time." On the evidence of this document, the Governnment is not quite H. L. Mencken's fellow: it has a narrow mind, narrow in the past, narrow today, but it is exhibitting some faint signs, a small luminosity on the far horizon of a broadening mind tomorrow.

For the most part, Energy-Ireland's thinking is ten years. out of date. It is a cousin of the clear-cut, confident report on energy that was produced by the metric ton in the United States, France, West Germany, and Britain until the early seventies. That is to say, it conncentrates heavily on how the nation is to supply energy but places much less emphasis on how people may be encoutged to use less.

It looks at nuclear power with the sweet vague gaze that a baby views his rattle. You would never guess from reading this brown paper parcel that in Europe tens of thousands demonstrated against nuclear reactors last year, that major US reactor companies are in fearrful financial trouble, and that West Germany has cut, cut, and cut again its reactor programme.

O'Malley's paper opens with Ireland's major problem: "Imported oil now accounts for nearly 75% of Our total energy requirements. Our life style depends on oil." Clearly, oil is not a dependable thing on which to style your life; hence Ireland needs new energy sources to reduce this dependence and to fuel Ireland's planned economic growth.

Within its limits, this is all very fair, but the report quickly moves into a controversial area, this Byzantine business of energy forecasting. Official forecasts of the major industrial powers have been found time and again to have been widely exaggerated. Government forecasters predict a gargantuan demand and then government planners declare this demand can only be met by I massive investment in new energy sources. Why should Ireland's similar official forecasts be any different? Well, Ireland is not industrially as developed a nation as France or West Germany, and it can be reasoned that major new industrial plants will cause a great increase in the need for energy. But this argument can be overdone: a study published last year by the Brookings Institute in Washington undermines the confident view in EnergyyIreland that more GNP inevitably leads I to more energy use.

But energy methods today can allow II for great increases in GNP with a constant energy demand. Ignoring this, I Energy-Ireland, positing industrial growth I rates of 11 percent in 1978, 1979, and i 1980 and 8 percent per year in the postt1 1980 period comes up with a Brobdingnagian increase in energy in Ireland. The Government claims that Ireland will use more than twice as much energy in 1990 as it used last year, and that by the year 2000 "Energy requirement could be in the region of 30 million tons of oil equivalent." That is up four times in 23 years. It is a great leap, to somewhere.

I t is this sort of projection that has given energy forecasters a bad name all around the world. The forecasts are based heavily on exponential growth and a failure to do something known as disaggregating. This was satirised recently by the English writer, Richard Boston. He asked "If a man eats a boiled egg for breakfast on Monday and rwo i boiled eggs on Tuesday, how many willi he consume for breakfast on Saturday? The sensible answer would be that he might eat none, or one, or two, or possibly even three." Boston writes that the energy forecasters would come up with a different answer. "One on Monday and two on Tuesday clearly establishes an upward movement of exponential growth. Our friend will therefore require four eggs on Wednesday, eight eggs on Thursday, sixteen on Friday, and thirtyytwo on Saturday. By the end of the next week his breakfast will have extrapolated to 4056 boiled eggs."

O'MALLEY'S paper is a strange amalgam of caution and recklesssness. It "is cautious on conservation, making the right noises, but allotting it 1.5 million tons of oil equivalent saved by 1990. It is reckeless on nuchear power, dismissing major problems such as waste disposal by lightly saying, "The Government is confident a dissposal method will be found."

But in April, the US Congressional committee on Government operations reported, "The management of these wastes seems to have been virtually dismissed with an attitude, "American technology can take care of it when the time comes .. .' when in fact the 'answer to the problem is still not at hand or even in sight."

The same US congressional committee would laugh heartily at Energy-Ireland's attempt to prove that nuclear power is an economical power source. The Commmittee, after long deliberations, conncluded the contrary in April. EnergyyIreland mainly relies on figures from Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board to make its case, but those figures are based on early British reactors which were secretly subsidized by the nuclear bomb programme and the figures do not take into account the cost of building new reactors. The capital cost of reactors has been rising about twice as fast as that of coal-fired power stations.

If, as now seems likely, nuclear fission is too big, too expensive, and too unnreliable for Ireland's electricity network, to what can the country turn? The answer might be in Sweden. The Swedes have followed a policy of building small coal-fired power stations near towns in order to use their waste heat for warming houses as well as their power for making electricity .

This policy has given Sweden signifiicantly better generating figures than Britain. Of course, it would be possible to use the waste heat from a nuclear station. Unfortunately, they can not be put near towns. The risks are too great.

If Ireland went for the Swedish solution over the next decade she might find at the end of it new developments in the use of tidal energy, for which Ireland's coasts are ideal. Ireland would then be one nation that had neatly sideestepped the whole messy nuclear controversy •