By John Spain

THERE are advantages to being stuck out in the Atlantic on a small island on the far west of Europe — lovely fresh air, gentle rain to keep everything green, uncrowded open spaces, a lifestyle still close to nature and relatively relaxed in spite of the Celtic Tiger boom.

But being on the outer edge of Europe also has disadvantages. One of the biggest is the price of energy here, higher than almost anywhere else on this side of the Atlantic because most of it has to be imported, and because getting imported energy in here is expensive due to our geographical isolation.

Our own sources of energy have almost run out. Peat (turf) is almost finished, and anyway is not efficient enough for modern needs.

The little coal we had is long gone. Hydroelectric power is generated but limited because we only have one river as big as the Shannon where the dam is located. In spite of years of searching around our coasts, there’s no oil worth mentioning.

Yet as a country we are, per capita, the third biggest consumer of oil among the 30-plus countries in Europe. Getting oil in here is expensive because we are remote and because there are none of the economies of scale that bigger countries like the U.K. or France enjoy.

It’s even worse with natural gas, on which we have become very reliant, because we are the very last country on the gas pipeline across Europe from the huge gas fields in Russia. We did find a sizeable natural gas field off the south coast here, but after 20 years that is now running out. A new one off the west coast is relatively small and has yet to come on stream.

So if Russian President Vladimir Putin gets petulant about something and decides to shut off or cut back the gas supply coming into Europe, who do you think is likely to be left short? It’s the guy at the end of the line, of course, and that’s us. Russia’s recent use of the gas supply as a way of putting manners on Ukraine and Georgia has made people here very conscious of our vulnerability.

All of which means that there has been increasing official talk here in the last few years about seriously developing alternative natural sources of energy, like wind and wave power and even solar energy.

Sadly, a lot of the talk has been no more than hot air. It’s all fine in theory, but the reality of generating wind and wave power on a large scale is proving to be much more difficult than you might think for a country geographically in such an ideal location for both.

In spite of the enthusiasm of the brown rice brigade, the technologies involved are still in their infancy and the financial incentives are not there to make wind and wave attractive alternatives. Oil and gas are still cheaper, simpler and more reliable. But of course that is starting to change, spurred on recently by the soaring price of oil.

The big unmentionable here is nuclear power. I’m old enough to remember when all us Irish hippies and students descended on Carnsore Point on the Wexford coastline more than 30 years ago because the government of the day wanted to build Ireland’s first nuclear station there.

There were several weekend demos there over a couple of years in the late 1970s until the government finally changed course, having learned by then that the whole country was against the nuclear option.

It’s been the great unmentionable ever since, the elephant in the corner of the energy debate in Ireland. It’s now taken as an unchangeable national position that nuclear power generation here is not now and never will be acceptable. Even so, the way things are going more and more people are now mentioning the unmentionable.

An inter-party Dail (Parliament) Committee here recently issued a major report on our future energy needs and the kind of planning we should be doing now. The report highlighted Ireland’s dependency on oil, with 60% of our total energy needs now coming from oil even though we all know it’s going to virtually run out by 2050.

Our peat (or turf) will finally run out in 15 years. The Kinsale gas field off the south coast is almost finished, and the new smaller Corrib field off the west coast is not even opened. We can’t rely on international gas supplies beyond 2050 no more than we can on oil.

The committee revealed that only 5% of Ireland’s energy is currently generated by wind and wave power, and it said there are doubts about our ability to increase that share in the time available. Wave power systems are expensive and still unproven, and offshore wind power systems are still prohibitively expensive unless heavy subsidies are provided.

On land wind systems are not popular with the public, even on the limited scale we now have them. No one wants to live near a wind turbine because of noise and the visual intrusion on the landscape.

So we have planning objections and local demonstrations whenever a few new wind turbines are proposed. Given the way people feel, it’s hard to see acceptance of wind farms on the vast scale that would be needed to replace oil or gas.

The dreamers talk about how bio-fuels like oil seed rape could be grown by farmers here to be used in cars, with an acre of rape generating enough oil to run a car for 5,000 miles. That sounds impressive, but the reality is that we’re not all farmers and our current national consumption of energy in cars is equivalent to around 2.6 million acres of rape, which amounts to most of the arable land in the country.

The Dail Committee’s energy report said that Ireland is more exposed to the dual threats of price increases and supply disruption than anywhere else in Europe.

All of which brings us back to nuclear. This year the cost of electricity here (because a lot of it is generated from oil and gas turbines) and the price of domestic gas have jumped by around 30%, a very loud wake-up call to Irish consumers. In fact householders here have been forced to pay a 61% increase in electricity prices since 2000.

Such price shocks are already starting to soften public attitudes to the nuclear option in Ireland, plus the realization that since we are now hooked into the European electricity grid some of our electricity is already coming from nuclear stations anyway, so we are already involved.

But so far, although the all-party committee is warning about our future, no party here is brave enough to say nuclear may be the only way for us to go. Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern has ruled out nuclear power, saying that alternative energy sources and improving efficiency are the key as world oil supplies dwindle. But have you seen the size of Ahern’s official car?

There has never been a national poll on the issue, but Ahern says he believes the vast majority of Irish people have concerns about nuclear energy. And this of course is true, but the real question is at what point will energy price hikes overcome those concerns?

Ahern says that our continuing economic growth means we have to urgently find solutions. Ireland, with a projected population of six million in 30 years, faces huge energy challenges in the future.

Even though he is aware of the problem, Ahern seems slow about facing up to the inevitable. But a combination of ever more expensive oil and the need to meet our carbon emission reduction undertakings will force us to change current energy policy.

A recent report by Forfas, the state enterprise policy advisory body here, said Ireland should not rule out nuclear energy as part of a strategy to lessen the economy’s dependence on oil.

The Green Party here is arguing that even if nuclear power were acceptable, it should be ruled out because the World Energy Council has said that new nuclear power plants would only be economically viable if they were built to produce at least 1,000 megawatts of electricity (a fifth of the peak demand in Ireland).

The Greens say there would be a need for the same amount of back-up power in reserve whenever there was a breakdown, and the cost of this back-up would be prohibitively expensive in a small market the size of Ireland.

Which is true, but that argument understates how important connectivity and power-sharing will be in the future across the European grid. We may be able to get a lot of the back-up from abroad.

We also have to keep one eye on what is going on around the world, where growing concerns about global warming are making nuclear a more polite word in civilized circles. That and the end of oil scenario.

China, for example, recently signed a big deal with Australia for uranium supplies with an eye to boosting its nuclear power in the future (at present its enormous demand for energy is highly dependent on foreign oil supplies). India is already a big nuclear generator.

Closer to home, Britain is about to expand its nuclear program over the next two decades. France already generates up to 80% of its electricity with nuclear power.

And those are just a few examples. With the trend already clear, how long can Ireland maintain its holier than thou stance on nuclear?

The truth is that it’s time we took our heads out of the sand in Ireland and faced up to the fact that Ireland’s future will probably be nuclear. I don’t like it anymore than anyone else.

But we need to have a grown-up debate about when and where rather than if, and about what to do with our nuclear waste. And we need to do it long before the oil starts to run out.