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Chairman, fellow-speakers, ladies and gentlemen,
I’m very grateful to Eamon Cashell and CIT for inviting me to participate in your Science Week celebrations. It’s always good to be in Cork, acknowledged as the centre of the universe!
I’m particularly delighted to find myself in this splendid venue, the Cork School of Music, and in such distinguished company. Not being either a scientist or an engineer, my perspective on our topic this evening is very much that of the interested lay-person, enlightened, I hope, by what little knowledge I’ve gleaned from a lifelong interest in environmental politics and the years I spent working as a public affairs specialist with British Nuclear Fuels plc, or BNFL as they were more commonly known.
The clash of beliefs vs. science, or beliefs vs. evidence, is currently a hot topic. People, of course, will always believe what they want to believe. However, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary most people usually change their minds, though that can take a long time. Still, it would be a rare person these days who would insist the earth is flat or that the sun spins around the planet. What distinguishes nuclear power though, in my experience, is that beliefs invariably triumph over evidence, particularly in relation to health impacts of radiation or other perceived threats.
The beliefs vs. science argument goes to the heart of any debate on nuclear power in Ireland and we have a long history in this country, particularly among our politicians, cheered on by most of the media, of jettisoning the science when it conflicts with long cherished prejudices.
Last month, for example, on the 50th anniversary of the Windscale Fire, a study was published in Britain on the dispersion across Europe of the fallout from that accident. The study by Manchester University Professors, John Garland and Richard Wakeford, had involved several years work, piecing together the path of the plumes that rose over Sellafield on Thursday 10th and Friday 11 October 1957, using the latest meteorological technology to create a map. Garland and Wakeford concluded that a great deal more radiation was released during the fire than was disclosed at the time. They confirmed that information to the public on the scale of the release was politically suppressed after the fire, and they suggested that the reference scale for cancer deaths in Britain attributable to the Windscale accident over time should therefore be revised upwards.
Much of what these scientists said was already well known. I know, because I’d read it several months previously on the internet site www.sciencedirect.com before its official publication, as part of the research for my own book, Going Nuclear. To me, what was most interesting was that it reinforced the conclusions of previous studies on the impact of the Windscale fallout on Ireland by Irish scientists, notably a UCD physics team in 2005 and an earlier epidemiological study on the Dundalk Down’s syndrome cluster. The science shows there was no evidence of any significant radiation from the Windscale accident having ever reached Ireland and therefore no health consequences for Ireland’s population. In the general political and media hullabaloo that greeted publication of Garland’s study, neither media nor politicians acknowledged these facts. Instead, the study was selectively reported and shamelessly represented as supporting the case for new investigations. To complete the farce, our Minister for Foreign Affairs was dispatched to express his disquiet about its revelations to his counterpart in London.
John Garland, by the way, is regarded as the foremost world authority on the Windscale Fire and its impact. For much of his working life, Garland was a scientist with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, owners and operators of the Windscale reactors. Richard Wakeford worked for British Nuclear Fuels plc for over thirty years. This was the first time, in my experience, that the credentials of Garland and Wakeford as former nuclear industry scientists were not questioned by the anti-nuclear lobby or in the media.
When it comes to nuclear issues, we have an unerring proclivity to pick and choose what evidence we will accept or reject; whose scientific integrity will be regarded as beyond any question and whose will be subject to reproach. The nuclear debate here is still irredeemably polarised. The current bias favours anything that supports an anti-nuclear perspective. I shudder to think what headlines we would have and what policies we would be asked to endorse if the bias suddenly tilted in the opposite direction. But if we’re going to have a sensible debate about the place of nuclear technology in our future energy options, then we’re going to have to arrive at a more balanced response as to what science is actually telling us.
Energy policy, of its nature, is long-term. Given the conjunction of global warming and an impending fuel crisis, it’s extremely important that we make the right choice, from the point of view of the environment, our economy, our international obligations and our future generations. We’ve been here before: hence, the political decision in 1979, at the height of the second oil crisis, to build a coal-fired station at Moneypoint. The second string to the government’s bow at the time was a plan to build a nuclear power station at Carnsore Point in Co. Wexford. This was a decision they had inherited from the previous Fine Gael/Labour coalition. Des O’Malley later told me that he felt very strongly that Ireland, a small country, geographically always at the end of someone else’s pipeline, should never again be so dependant on oil to keep the lights on and the economy afloat.
Moneypoint was built and became a key part of our energy infrastructure and will probably remain so for some time to come. Carnsore Point was never built, as we all know.
Political mythology decrees that mass popular protest at the Carnsore site killed off the nuclear option in Ireland. Far from it; it was simple economics. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania did for the Carnsore project. TMI -2, a nuclear power plant of the type the ESB wanted to build at Carnsore, had only been in operation for a few weeks when the reactor meltdown occurred.
TMI-2 cost $500m to build. The clean up estimate after the accident was €1bn. In the wake of that accident, no small utility company like the ESB and no government of a small impoverished country like Ireland could risk building a power plant costing half a billion that might fail after a couple of months and leave a clean-up bill of twice the original cost. It’s not the sort of legacy for which politicians want to be remembered in the history books.
The lesson we can draw is that you can pick an energy option that appears best suited to environmental objectives; but if the economic, or the political, cases for it don’t stack up, you had best forget about it.
So here we are in 2007, still at the end of someone else’s pipeline, and in the medium term facing a crisis of sustainability and of security of supply. This puts nuclear back in the frame.
Generally, we might do well to bear a few things in mind: first; there is no energy technology that comes at zero environmental cost or without a significant economic cost attached. There is no such thing as ‘free’ energy, be it from wind, wave, biomass, solar, biofuels, hydro, gas, oil, coal or nuclear. Anyone suggesting otherwise is a knave, a fool, a liar or a politician; or possibly a combination of all four.
Second, energy policy is always political. But in 2007 we have to apply a very different political perspective to our energy choices than in the 1970s, because the stakes are much higher.
Third, we need to shift the debate out of the adversarial combat zone of nuclear vs. renewables, or any other such variation. Energy policy goes to the heart of our own future and the lives of our children and grandchildren. It merits the engagement of all sections of our society and it is far too important to be left to the zealots on either side, whose views will prevail on the basis of who can shout the loudest.
Fourth, if we are going to have a serious debate, we need to break out of the parallel universe about nuclear issues that we have uniquely constructed in this country especially around the campaign to “Shut Sellafield”.
Shut Sellafield was universally popular as a mantra among politicians. They all knew it was a manifestly absurd proposition; that Sellafield could not close for another 150 years at least. And if they didn’t, they should have. But as a policy it had the virtue of not involving anything that might inflict pain on any section of the Irish electorate. It served as a tremendous distraction from our own mounting environmental problems. Most important, there was no apparent political cost attached to it in respect of Anglo-Irish relations or national policy.
They were wrong about the last bit: there are consequences. For instance, we don’t and can’t admit to having a nuclear waste problem of our own. Not far from where we are this evening there are 1500 slugs of natural uranium and a plutonium/beryllium source, courtesy of a ‘magnificent gift’, as Frank Aiken once described it, from the United States under the Atoms for Peace Programme. The nuclear training reactor that was used to teach UCC physics students about nuclear reactions has long since been dismantled and the fuel placed in storage here in Cork under IAEA safeguards. The Americans don’t want the fuel back. It was a gift. As I understand it, it would cost in the region of seven or eight million euro to have the material taken out of Cork and this country and properly disposed of. But nobody wants to talk about it publicly, never mind deal with the controversy that must inevitably rain down on any export plan. So presumably it will stay where it is, for the time being.
After 9/11, the IAEA investigated how nuclear materials might be diverted to terrorist use, such as dirty bombs. As a result, the European Union introduced the HASS Directive. Under this law, each member state is supposed to track down ‘orphan nuclear sources’ - that is, items with a radioactive source that are widely used throughout industry, in hospitals and in laboratories. In this case, items whose final legal ownership cannot be determined. Then they are supposed to put them in a safe place, preferably in boreholes, underground, where the radioactivity will decay naturally over a few hundred years. In other words, build a nuclear waste repository. Incidentally, this issue in Ireland predates the HASS Directive, by about twenty five years, but was always long-fingered by successive Ministers.
The Directive was transposed into Irish law in 2005 by Statutory Instrument. This means it was not discussed by the Dail and totally ignored by the media. According to our law, orphan sources are to be dealt with on a “case by case” basis, whatever that means, by our nuclear watchdog, the RPII, in conjunction with the Department of Environment. That this is both stupid and irresponsible is, to my mind, beyond question.
Then there was that other great legacy of 9/11, the decision at a cost of several million euro of taxpayers money to distribute iodine tablets to every household in the country in case of a terrorist attack on Sellafield. That particular political initiative was mainly driven by media hysteria and, I believe, the imminence of the next general election. Suffice to say that at the very time the packets of iodine tablets were dropping through your letter-box and mine, the health authorities in West Cumbria were withdrawing the same tablets from households within the emergency zone around Sellafield, on the grounds that they were no longer necessary and having them in places where children might inadvertently gain access to them constituted a public health risk.
I relate these stories not to throw mud at our politicians, but to question whether we can have any kind of mature debate unless and until we change our current mindset on nuclear energy to one more fitting the circumstances and realities of the 21st century. The Minister for Energy, Eamon Ryan, has publicly stated he wants a debate. But in the same breath tells us what the outcome will be: nuclear will be decisively rejected. Opposition spokespersons are literally falling over one another clamouring for the same thing.
Are they in earnest? I think the answer has to be “no”. Since 1999, we’ve had a statutory ban on the construction of any nuclear power plant in Ireland. And I’ve not yet heard any politician propose any change in that law.
It seems to me a bit pointless and academic to become embroiled in debates about what kind of nuclear reactor would be best suited to Ireland, or when or how it might happen, if our politicians, for fear of public opinion, cannot face up to the relatively minor issue of our own nuclear legacy or repeal our Taliban- style ban on nuclear energy. We have a long way to go too on beliefs, and fantasies, about the wilful harm inflicted upon us by Perfidious Albion’s nuclear installations. Our public representatives could afford the luxury of such self-indulgence and sanctimony about our nuclear-free status in the past, even if it wasn’t, strictly speaking, accurate. We, the people, can afford it no longer.
Thank you.
Veronica McDermott; author ‘Going Nuclear, Ireland, Britain and the Campaign to close Sellafield” (IAP October 2007)
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