Matt TreacyIn the summer of 1978, our family were on our way to Wexford for our annual holiday. It was during the weekend of the big musical festival at Carnsore Point to protest against the proposal for a nuclear power plant here.

The impressive line-up featured virtually everyone who was anyone on the Irish music scene. Ireland’s Woodstock, so it was.

As we passed throngs of people on our way further south to Curracloe my father was grumbling about hippies and communists. This stimulated a brief political debate in the back seat among the five of us squashed childer.

My sister Maria, ever a rock of sense and obviously realising that asking my Da was pointless, piped up.

“Mammy, are you anti-nuclear?”

“No,” interjected Jimmy. “She’s Aunty Patsy.” We were a comical family.

Since that time, the mere mention of the Irish state using nuclear generation plants to create a long-term domestic energy source has been anathema. Back then, the pop tabloid Hot Press, which probably supplies a significant proportion of the intellectual content of our current political elite, described the Green Paper on nuclear as “diluted bullshit.”

The public opposition eventually led to the prohibition on the building of nuclear power plants as part of the Electricity Regulation Act (1999).

Like many things in Ireland, this “ban” amounts to little more than virtue signalling as a significant and growing part of the electricity that is imported through interconnectors is generated in nuclear plants based in other countries. In the flat earth schema of Green leftie types, presumably – just like the CO2 emissions pumped out by “progressive” China which politely stay within their own air space – a nuclear accident in France would stop at Cherbourg.

Whether the threat of a nuclear accident is a significant one, is rarely debated. The only major accident one which had an impact on the human and general environment was at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 when it was under the rule of socialist bureaucrats. Like most of the disasters of socialism, the fault lay in human incompetence rather than the means controlled by the commissars.

Benjamin Sovacool of the Danish Centre for Energy Technology has estimated the number of direct fatalities from accidents at nuclear plants to be 44 since 1957, 28 of them at Chernobyl along with estimates of up to 5,000 subsequent deaths from cancer. Far more people have died directly and indirectly from mining, off shore gas and oil exploration and other energy related activities.

All that aside, there is a persuasive argument surely in favour of Ireland exploring the nuclear option as a means both to reduce the use of fossil fuels and more importantly to create a sustainable indigenous source that could greatly reduce our dangerous level of dependence on imported energy.

Those who are in favour of the “nuclear option” also point to other advantages in terms of electricity costs, land use, employment and others. As one example of potential savings, the unit cost per household for electricity in the Irish Republic in 2020 was the fourth highest of all the then 28 EU members states.

This was around a third higher than in France which generates around 70% of its electricity from nuclear and from whom we intend to import nuclear generated electricity through the planned Celtic Interconnector.

At present yet another steep increase in household energy costs is being cited as an example of the costs being paid by the indigenous population for generations of failure of the elite, combined with the current ideologically driven closure of our only viable domestic source in the peat sector.

So, nuclear is something that ought to be the subject of a “national conversation,” as proposed by the authors of a study on Nuclear Development in Ireland published by 18 for 0. It sets out a particular view on the advantages of pursuing such a policy, which might serve as the initiator of such a discussion. 

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

Should Ireland Go Nuclear?

Matt TreacyIn the summer of 1978, our family were on our way to Wexford for our annual holiday. It was during the weekend of the big musical festival at Carnsore Point to protest against the proposal for a nuclear power plant here.

The impressive line-up featured virtually everyone who was anyone on the Irish music scene. Ireland’s Woodstock, so it was.

As we passed throngs of people on our way further south to Curracloe my father was grumbling about hippies and communists. This stimulated a brief political debate in the back seat among the five of us squashed childer.

My sister Maria, ever a rock of sense and obviously realising that asking my Da was pointless, piped up.

“Mammy, are you anti-nuclear?”

“No,” interjected Jimmy. “She’s Aunty Patsy.” We were a comical family.

Since that time, the mere mention of the Irish state using nuclear generation plants to create a long-term domestic energy source has been anathema. Back then, the pop tabloid Hot Press, which probably supplies a significant proportion of the intellectual content of our current political elite, described the Green Paper on nuclear as “diluted bullshit.”

The public opposition eventually led to the prohibition on the building of nuclear power plants as part of the Electricity Regulation Act (1999).

Like many things in Ireland, this “ban” amounts to little more than virtue signalling as a significant and growing part of the electricity that is imported through interconnectors is generated in nuclear plants based in other countries. In the flat earth schema of Green leftie types, presumably – just like the CO2 emissions pumped out by “progressive” China which politely stay within their own air space – a nuclear accident in France would stop at Cherbourg.

Whether the threat of a nuclear accident is a significant one, is rarely debated. The only major accident one which had an impact on the human and general environment was at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 when it was under the rule of socialist bureaucrats. Like most of the disasters of socialism, the fault lay in human incompetence rather than the means controlled by the commissars.

Benjamin Sovacool of the Danish Centre for Energy Technology has estimated the number of direct fatalities from accidents at nuclear plants to be 44 since 1957, 28 of them at Chernobyl along with estimates of up to 5,000 subsequent deaths from cancer. Far more people have died directly and indirectly from mining, off shore gas and oil exploration and other energy related activities.

All that aside, there is a persuasive argument surely in favour of Ireland exploring the nuclear option as a means both to reduce the use of fossil fuels and more importantly to create a sustainable indigenous source that could greatly reduce our dangerous level of dependence on imported energy.

Those who are in favour of the “nuclear option” also point to other advantages in terms of electricity costs, land use, employment and others. As one example of potential savings, the unit cost per household for electricity in the Irish Republic in 2020 was the fourth highest of all the then 28 EU members states.

This was around a third higher than in France which generates around 70% of its electricity from nuclear and from whom we intend to import nuclear generated electricity through the planned Celtic Interconnector.

At present yet another steep increase in household energy costs is being cited as an example of the costs being paid by the indigenous population for generations of failure of the elite, combined with the current ideologically driven closure of our only viable domestic source in the peat sector.

So, nuclear is something that ought to be the subject of a “national conversation,” as proposed by the authors of a study on Nuclear Development in Ireland published by 18 for 0. It sets out a particular view on the advantages of pursuing such a policy, which might serve as the initiator of such a discussion. 

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

8 comments:

  1. Isn't there already electrical connectors with GB? Britain already has nuclear generated power so it's nothing new. With the next generation of Molten Salt/Thorium reactors they are a lot safer again, and if the breakneck push to get a working fusion reactor is successful then the game changes dramatically.

    Incidentally the reason why it's perhaps not taken up in Ireland yet is the huge initial cost. But hasn't Ireland hit nearly 40-50% from wind farms recently? Last time I checked it never stopped feckin blowing when I was home! Wind and battery banks like the huge Tesla ones we have in South Australia could easily power Ireland all year round. Add into the mix offshore wave turbines and they could end up a net exporter of green electricity but it will take political will to front up the cash first.

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    1. Steve

      I don't think the wind farms are producing anywhere near that level of energy -its about 20-30% or less. The wind blown and passed in Leinster House and Stormont is energy lost to the cosmos and lost unproductively.

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  2. Matt Treacy comments As you say, the fact that nuclear generated electricity is already imported and all of the French via Celtic interconnector will be makes nonsense of ban.

    Probably way too late and costly now as a budgetary item. Same applies to wave. Would be guaranteed to make Ireland an exporter but political elite of all stripes prefer talking about it than doing. Symptom of neo colonial rentier mentality.

    Country run by buffoon with worse ones waiting in the wings.

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  3. “Mammy, are you anti-nuclear?”
    “No,” interjected Jimmy. “She’s Aunty Patsy.” We were a comical family." Priceless.
    I lived in France in the late 1980's.
    Being an anti-nuclear activist from Aotearoa New Zealand who was on the wharf an hour after the French DGSE blew up the Greeenpeace Rainbow Warrior murdering our comrade Fernando Pereira, I was openly opposed to nuclear power.
    My French friends argued "You don't understand what it's like to be at war with your neighbours and have your borders closed. A nation must be able to feed and provide power to it's inhabitants"
    I do actually know what it's like to be invaded by a neighbour but paradoxically they had a point.
    Fernando drowned in his cabin after the second explosion whilst retrieving his camera equipment.

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  4. The elephant in the room of course is talking about reaching zero carbon in the domestic energy supply whilst vast natural resources at Corrib and Kinsale are extracted by multinationals like Shell, at no benefit to the Irish, much better they were nationalised and the revenues used like Norway to fund self sufficiency in renewables.

    And whilst Matt cites the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, Japan's Fukushima is strangely overlooked, for only capitalist greed could countenance building something as precarious as a nuclear power plant on an island nation plagued with earthquakes and tsunamis! Good news of course for the Japanese whaling industry as they will be able to whale around the clock with the endangered mammals now likely to glow in the dark! P

    resumably in the advent of an indigenous nuclear disaster ,being such a small land mass the Irish will be expected to swim for it, or reconcile to the rapid evolutionary feature of having three arseholes and a horn !

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  5. With potential power shortages this winter, I was thinking that perhaps Ireland should have nuclear as an option. So I attended a recent online seminar organised by Engineers Ireland. The speaker from Wind Energy Ireland gave an impressive technical presentation on why he believes that Ireland should be able to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2035 through the expansion of wind power.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFRNRBUeFFM

    The YouTube link doesn't include the question and answer session afterwards. I asked whether he thought that nuclear should be part a low/zero carbon emission strategy for Ireland. He said that he believed the capital costs and communication challenges would not be worth it and that Ireland's energy requirements would already be addressed by the time any nuclear facility would come online.

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  6. Surely we could harness Big Gerry for some type of hot air extractor?

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