A SENIOR civil servant likened the risk of death from a major accident at a nuclear station to the risk of death from an insect sting or an animal bite, State papers released by the National Archives show.
Plans were progressing for a nuclear power plant at Carnsore Point in 1978 when the official from the Department of the Taoiseach wrote that the risk of an accident was “extremely low”. If such an accident happened, the most probable outcome would be 100-350 deaths, he said.
The official was not to know that two of the most prominent nuclear accidents would happen in the following years. The Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania happened one year later which resulted in major changes to safety procedures in the nuclear industry, while the Chernobyl disaster unfolded in 1986.
Opposition to the proposed nuclear plant at Carnsore was growing when the official wrote the note, but concern over the future of oil and gas supplies was also growing in government circles. A prescient letter from taoiseach Jack Lynch to minister for energy Des O’Malley noted that experts were warning that fossil fuels would be insufficient to satisfy world energy at the turn of the century.
In his memo, the Department of the Taoiseach official wrote that there was “little time to be lost before placing orders for a nuclear station” but if a large enough hydrocarbon discovery resulted in drilling in that year, then the government should not commit itself irrevocably to a nuclear station.
“The risk of a major accident in a nuclear station is estimated to be extremely low,” he wrote. “For an individual the risk of death from such an accident is as low or almost so as that from being killed by lightning or as a result of a sting or bite from an insect or animal.
Plane crashes, dam bursts and industrial explosions were all more likely to occur, he said.
He said the nuclear industry maintained that such accidents were not credible “and I am persuaded of this, except in a war”.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride wrote to the taoiseach in April 1978, expressing concern about the nuclear plant plans and urging an examination of alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind, tidal and wave power.
He pointed to a plan that had been discussed decades earlier, involving the conversion of Clew Bay into a reservoir for the production of electricity. “Seventy years ago such a scheme might well have been uneconomical and regarded as impractical, but would it be so in the circumstances of today?”
There was huge public opposition to the nuclear plant plan, with more than 5,000 people attending a rally and concert at Carnsore Point in August of that year. Another festival was held the following year and eventually the plan was quietly abandoned.
