By Sally Low
PRAGUE — Energy will always be expensive in Czechoslovakia. Apart from brown coal of such poor quality that it should never be used, and some uranium, there are few natural sources. Lack of seaports makes fossil fuel imports very costly.
Yet Czechoslovakia has one of the highest per capita consumptions of energy in the world. Per unit of GDP, it is around twice the West European average. However, household and service sector consumption is far lower than in the West. Official figures estimate that 50% of all energy consumed goes to industry, which was built to rely on a continuous flow of cheap power from the Soviet Union.
While every five year plan after 1973 announced a new energy saving program, they were, say environmentalists, largely ineffective. Poor, badly maintained infrastructure means that about one-third of energy produced is lost before it reaches the point of consumption. In winter uninsulated hot water pipes expend much of their heat to melt the snow and the ground through which they run. Most buildings are also uninsulated.
Policy makers now face many problems in trying to plan for the country's future energy needs: how to lessen the sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxides and other harmful emissions from the country's brown coal fired stations; how to make energy consumption more efficient; and how to determine and meet future needs.
Contradictory pressures are likely to arise from the introduction of market forces. Some inefficient, power-intensive industries will be shut down and yet, in order to avoid this and even to attract Western investment, governments are likely to continue to supply power at highly subsidised prices.
Private consumers, whose low wages keep some Czechoslovak industries competitive, can ill afford further hikes in their cost of living. There have already been two power price rises since 1989 — one of 40% and another at the beginning of October of 70% — but still charges are nowhere near the real cost of production and delivery.
High consumption
1>Janos Vargha of the East European Environmental Research Institute in Budapest points out that energy investment decisions taken now will determine whether countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary will continue or break the vicious circle of high energy consumption.0>
Money invested in building new power plants could instead go to energy-saving alternative technologies and decentralisation, he argues. But once the decision to invest in further energy production is made, the economy is locked into the dynamic of trying to make that investment profitable, either by attracting industries to use it or by selling it to other countries.
Basically Czechoslovakia's federal government considers that there will either be a catastrophic economic collapse, and energy demand will decrease in the near future then pick up again in the long run, or that demand will continue to increase all the time, says Simona Bouskova, public relations officer for the Ministry of the Environment for the Czech Republic. Either way, the cycle will not be broken and vital resources are to be directed towards further production rather than energy saving.
Given the poor state of the economy, the social problems involved in restructuring industry and the present government's commitment to capitalist restoration according to the requirements of international financial institutions, this is hardly surprising.
One set of Western industrialists anxious to help East European countries along this road is of course the nuclear power manufacturers. What better way to solve the pollution caused by coal burning? Even some branches of the Green Party of Czechoslovakia are in favour of that option.
By contrast, a June conference of central and east European environmentalists and energy experts from around the world called on governments in this region to impose a moratorium on nuclear power plant construction and to develop programs to decommission existing sites.
Western companies
Framatome from France, Siemens from Germany, Westinghouse and Mitsubishi are all trying to get in on the act of improving safety standards on current reactors and building new ones. Framatome is advising the Czechoslovak government on how to reconstruct the industry using small nuclear power stations.
The government is also negotiating with Western companies to build new nuclear plants. One model which will possibly be adopted is the 1400 MW pressurised water reactor (PWR) developed by Siemens and Framatome.
Some estimates say 50% and some say 70% of future energy needs will be produced by nuclear reactors, claims Adam Novak, co-editor of the fortnightly Czechoslovak Business Update. Currently about 27% of the country's electricity is produced by Soviet-designed nuclear reactors at two plants, Jaslovske Bohunice in West Slovakia, with four reactors and Dukovany in South Moravia, also with four reactors. Another two, Temelin in Bohemia and Mochovce in Slovakia, are being built.
Framatome is also supplying technological know-how to improve safety measures at Bohunice, where two of the reactors are of the old-fashioned Soviet V230 PWR model, the same as that in Kozloduy in Bulgaria, which is now to be decommissioned because it is so unsafe.
The Austrian government has demanded that these be closed and has even offered to build new coal and oil fired plants but, claims Novak, the Czechoslovak government said it didn't want to rely on such old-fashioned technology. The Austrians also offered cheap electricity from their own sources, but for reasons of self-sufficiency and diversity of supply, the government is determined to maintain its nuclear program.
Most environmentalists agree that the Soviet-designed reactors are less safe than the best Western models. None of those in Czechoslovakia, for example, have the third protective dome to prevent radiation leaks. But this does not mean the Western models are safe. There is also still the problem of waste disposal.
'Two pillars'
"They always used to say our nuclear energy program stood on two pillars. The first was that we would get heat from it, the second was that there was no problem with all the waste because the Soviet Union agreed to take it. This is not the case any more because Yeltsin has announced that they will no longer accept it", explains Bouskova.
As for heat, she says, people living near Temelin were promised it would be free, as would electricity and "greenhouses where bananas and oranges would grow". Now many are angry as they realise that, at best, there will be a rather expensive heat supply for some nearby villages.
National and international protests against the completion of Temelin have highlighted the questionable foundations of the plant, the seismological instability of the site and other unsafe construction methods as additional reasons why it should not be completed.
Bouskova points out that much of the power that would be produced by Temelin could be saved by cutting consumption, or produced by co-generation (plants capturing or reusing energy given off during the initial production process).
The Skoda works that presently produce nuclear power equipment already have the technology and skill to make small decentralised heating stations, which could generate 1000 to 2000 MW, she says. However, the Swedish firm Asea Brown Boveri, Westinghouse and Siemens are currently competing for the right to form a joint venture with this wing of the Skoda company. They see it as a desirable enterprise because of low wages and the plant's experience in producing nuclear equipment for the central and east European market, claimed the September 9 Czech weekly Respekt.
"Western countries, especially in Western Europe, would like to improve their energy supply from eastern Europe including the European part of the USSR", says Janos Vargha. As their own reserves of oil and gas run out, West European governments would like to avoid again becoming heavily dependent on oil from the OPEC countries.
One plan, now discarded but still a dangerous possibility, is to actually step up production of brown coal fired power in northern Bohemia and sell it to the West in order to pay for the building of more nuclear reactors.
Researchers at the Energy Efficiency Centre in Prague are trying to influence the federal government and investors in favour of energy-saving technology. A recent delegation from the US and Canada spoke with officials here about "Least Cost Planning" — a method of economic incentives which encourage utilities to provide energy-efficient products to consumers.
Such programs are aimed mainly at private consumers and new buildings. While obviously worthwhile, they do not go to the heart of the energy dilemma in this and many other countries where infrastructure investments and planning are still geared towards expanding energy production. Some environmentalists think this period of transition to a market economy provides an opportunity for far-sighted innovations to avoid the mistakes made in many other industrialised market economies, but it does not look as if their hopes will be realised. n