Sir, You report that Ireland’s Sustainable Energy Authority (SEAI) is “updating” its current draft report on future options in order to include all forms of nuclear energy (“Ireland considering nuclear power as Government attitude shifts amid fresh energy crisis,” August 15th).
This is being done, it is said, to ensure that assumptions are “not too pessimistic” and on foot of a call from the Taoiseach Micheál Martin to “examine seriously” the option of generating nuclear energy within Ireland.
No “serious” review should exclude the costings and risks of long-term storage of nuclear waste, which are too often overlooked or omitted from the nuclear equation. Nuclear waste never goes away. Its forever storage is part of the cost of nuclear energy.
When Gill & Macmillan published my book on Sellafield in 2003, I pointed out the challenge in this respect. Even still, Britain has not yet adequately addressed the issue of its long-term nuclear waste storage. Indeed, the cost and timescale of its continued nuclear energy programme is problematic.
RM Block
We need neither pessimism nor optimism in this context, but realism. When the SEAI publishes its report, citizens (who are the ultimate “stakeholders”) should look first at its costings relative to forever storage, including an allocation for high security.
In an unstable world, both environmentally and politically, radioactive waste is a permanent liability.
The prospect of building an operational, conventional nuclear plant in Ireland by 2055, as some unnamed experts have reportedly suggested, is certainly not “too pessimistic”.
One assumes that by then the children’s hospital will be operational and people will be able to travel to Dublin Airport by metro. – Yours, etc.
COLUM KENNY,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.
Sir, – Your article on Ireland’s nuclear reconsideration (August 15th) invites an obvious question: what changed?
Just last year, the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien told an Oireachtas committee that nuclear power was “not even in the room”.
Now, amid a fresh energy crisis and with the Taoiseach Micheál Martin urging that we “examine seriously” the option, the door has swung wide open.
Are we witnessing a sober, science-led correction, finally reckoning with the limitations of an intermittent, developer-led renewables model that has not delivered the promised reduction in fossil-fuel dependence as UCC research has shown?
Or has data-centre demand simply become too large for our current grid strategy to absorb?
If it is the former, then failures in wind and grid planning deserve debate, not a quiet pivot. If it is the latter, let’s be honest about it.
A sustainable climate and energy policy should be built on robust evidence, ecological safeguards and public candour rather than framing an industrial energy requirement as crisis management. Either way, it is the next generation who will live with whatever patchwork policy we settle on now. – Yours, etc.
OLIVIA CAFOLLA,
Brittas Bay,
Co Wicklow.
