I’m getting a little scared. All this talk of nuclear power is making me nervous. The EU Parl-iament started it all in October, when it identified nuclear energy as indispensable to Europe’s basic energy needs. Then Eamon Ryan, Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, called for a public debate in Ireland on nuclear energy on the same day that the British government gave the green light to nuclear expansion.
Later, I switched on RTÉ Radio 1 in the middle of a vox pop on whether Ireland should build nuclear power plants to reduce our carbon emissions and help the fight against global warming. To my dismay, the majority of people seemed to be in favour of nuclear power. It was clear that even people who in the past opposed it now see it as the only option if we want to reduce our carbon footprint.
“It’s cheap,” most of them said, when asked why they favoured the nuclear option. Cheap? Where did they get this notion? Everything I have read suggests that nuclear power plants are notoriously expensive to build.
In the USA in the late 1980s, some nuclear plants cost as much as $5bn. A new plant currently under construction in Finland is reported to be more than 25 per cent over its $4bn (3bn euro) budget. That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider that a recent Government allocation for research into sustainable energy projects in Ireland amounted to just 2.17m euro.
Once built, of course, you have to run, maintain, inspect and guard your nuclear power plants. You also have to deal with all the radioactive waste that they produce – waste that will hang about for centuries and could affect the lives and health of countless generations to come. A viable, long-term solution for the storage of radioactive waste has yet to be found.
Just when I was getting depressed, believing that I was alone in thinking that nuclear power is the easy, don’t-rock-our-lifestyles-to-hell-with-the-consequences option, I flicked open the pages of The Guardian’s weekend magazine, which listed the Fifty People Who Could Save the Planet. Among them was Amory Lovins, an American experimental physicist turned energy reduction pioneer.
Nuclear power, according to Lovins, is a romantic fantasy stuck in the 1950s. “New nuclear plants are so costly that spending the same on micro-power can save two to 10 times more CO2, and sooner,” he told The Guardian. “In 2005, renewables produced one sixth of the world’s total electricity and a third of new electricity. The revolution already happened – sorry if you missed it.” The USA, he added, could eliminate all oil use by 2050.
Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute work with governments, automobile, aviation and energy companies to reduce energy consumption by applying knowledge of composite materials, engineering, design and energy storage.
It is clear that any decision to go nuclear at this point will be a decision made in ignorance of what ever else is available. It is, for example, ludicrous to talk of building nuclear power plants here, when we have yet to ensure that all new buildings conform to the highest standards of energy conservation, and that the rest of us live in the most energy efficient homes possible. How many houses have solar panels, for example? How many attics are fully insulated? How many of us live in homes with only A-rated appliances?
Thirty years ago, this country was on the brink of building four nuclear power stations at Carnsore Point in Co Wexford. The plans were quietly dropped in the face of widespread public opposition. How farsighted the Irish people were at that time, and how little the decision to dump nuclear affected our growing economic prosperity.
Let’s hope that we make a similarly sophisticated decision this time and adopt the new and emerging technologies, rather than looking back to the past.
Yvonne Healy is a former Irish Times journalist who has returned to Ireland from the United States. Her column appears monthly in Metro Eireann
