D’oh! We all need to talk about the nuclear question like grown-ups
The evidence shows it’s safer and more reliable than any other fuel... and yet the debate here is so facile it would make Homer Simpson blush!
IT’S partly Homer Simpson’s fault that we can’t have a sensible discussion about the potential for nuclear power to offer a climate-friendly alternative to the fossil fuels that provide us with the bulk of our electric power.
The beer-swilling (but loveable) yellow cartoon character just happened to work at a nuclear power plant in the fictional town of Springfield. The incompetent Homer worked for the skinflint owner Montgomery Burns, a caricature capitalist as cynical and greedy as you could imagine when it came to cutting corners on construction and safety.
The popularity of the longrunning cartoon series has waned since its once-iconic status but the bias against nuclear fuel remains deeply ingrained among its audience and beyond. Nuclear is way too dangerous we are told. What happens if a power plant leaks radiation or, horror of horrors, explodes? Remember Fukushima in Japan back in 2011 when a nuclear power plant was imperilled by a tsunami? Or the horrors of Chernobyl in Belarus, where an aged and dangerous plant was allowed to continue in operation by careless Soviet Union officials of the time? Go further back, to before I was born, and the Windscale nuclear power crisis in Cumbria in England (and the subsequent renaming of the facility as Sellafield). And remember the Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania in the US in the late 1970s?
That incident happened just 12 days before the release of one of the iconic movies of the period, the Michael Douglas thriller The China Syndrome, in which Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon also starred, the subject matter being the outcome of a nuclear meltdown.
THE term, which stuck, described where the components of a nuclear reactor melted all the way through their containment structures and into the underlying earth, all the way to China, if not literally. It certainly struck a chord with me as a teenager at the time, in the days before Homer Simpson was created. When the Irish government not long afterwards raised the idea of a nuclear reactor being constructed at Carnsore Point in Wexford the negative reaction was not unexpected.
Since then the political opposition to nuclear-generated energy in Ireland has been consistent. So much so that in 1999 an actual law was introduced to make it illegal to attempt to construct such a facility in Ireland.
But here’s the rub. Nuclear is nowhere near as dangerous as has been made out by some, if not all, environmental activists. Take Chernobyl as an example well-known to Ireland because of the wonderful char- itable work done by Adi Roche in bringing children with cancers and birth deformations, assumed to result from radiation poisoning, to Ireland.
It’s hard to argue with distressing pictures of sick children, but an authoritative United Nations report into the disaster found subsequently that the number of deaths that could be attributed directly to the disaster was less than 50, and that the damage to health in the area had been exaggerated. There was no rise in the level of birth defects in the region after the nuclear meltdown and cancer specialists said there was nothing to say that children had been affected by radiation.
More than a decade ago an American physics professor, Bernard Cohen, produced a book called The Nuclear Energy Option. It claimed that, averaged over time, only two people per year have died in nuclear accidents in America. This compares with the 10,000 who died each year in that country from air pollution caused by coal-burning electricity.
Air pollution is killing people and it is also causing the carbon emissions that are bringing about climate change and increasing sea temperatures. Ireland is one of the worst offenders in this regard, burning coal and peat, and importing vast quantities of oil and gas to feed our voracious appetite for energy.
Bord na Móna is in the process of phasing out its supply to the peat-burning ESB stations, which his good news, albeit not for the workers in the midlands who will lose their jobs in the future, but this will take some time to achieve. The coal fires
at the Moneypoint electricity generation plant in Co. Clare still burn and emit fumes. It supplies close to 15% of our entire electricity needs in a year and uses coal imported from Colombia to do so. The fly ash it produces emits 100 times more radiation than a similar-sized nuclear power plant, according to one estimate.
So here are some figures that the anti-nuclear lobby will not want you to consider. It is claimed that nuclear power has saved 1.8million lives to date by offering an alternative to the provision of the burning of fossil fuels as a source of energy. But we burn so much fossil fuel that seven million people died around the globe annually from illnesses directly linked to air pollution. The claim is that nuclear is actually the safest way to make reliable electricity… and it has the more important benefit of being the lowest carbon method as well.
Of course, there is the option of renewable sources, as favoured by most environmentalists. But consider this: nuclear apparently produces four times less carbon pollution than solar farms but solar needs 450 times more land mass than nuclear to produce the same amount of electricity.
WIND seems to be a better option for Ireland. There are days when about half of Irish electricity is generated by renewables – when the wind blows sufficiently. Wind as an electricity source is growing at a good pace. In 2018 about 28% of all the electricity produced in the republic came from this source. That will continue to increase. But it is variable – there’s not much of it around a calm summer’s day – and it poses challenges with storage. In the absence of nuclear, a fossil-fuel back-up is needed. There has been significant investment in the sector but it is unlikely that wind will ever fill more than 40% of our electricity needs on a year-long basis.
Much is often made of conservation as a way to reduce our demand for electricity. But how long is it going to take to retro-fit old buildings, both residential homes and commercial, to make them more energy efficient?
Are people really going to abandon their cars for public transport, or eat less meat in sufficient volume to damage farming output? The reality is that all nations use more energy as they develop, no matter what fashionable anticlimate change actions may be embraced by a responsible cohort. Our population is projected to grow. We will not able to reduce energy consumption.
We are also too reliant on its importation and this is where Brexit should give us reason to worry, especially if Britain attempts a no-deal exit from the European Union. We import oil and coal obviously and our own natural gas resources are limited. Over half of the gas that we use for electricity and heating, and three-quarters of our supply of oil products, mainly to provide for the transport and manufacturing sector, are imported. Worse, they come by way of UK ports, pipelines, refineries and sub-sea interconnectors.
The island of Ireland is connected to Britain through two electricity interconnectors and three gas interconnectors and our interconnector to France is not yet available.
It all means that we are at the mercy of world events, for energy being made available to us at a price we can afford.
The argument is that nuclear should co-exist with wind energy and other forms of renewables, if we are serious about achieving the kind of rapid decarbonisation necessary to avert the adverse reality of climate change.
But we know it is unlikely to happen. Any scientific evidence produced to overturn the 1999 law that bans the construction of nuclear plants in Ireland would be drowned out by scaremongering that any Irish nuclear plant would simply be an accident waiting to happen.
The spurious arguments put forward by the Nimbys (‘Not In My Back Yard’) to ensure that Ireland remains a nuclear-free zone would be even more extreme than those used to prevent the construction of other controversial infrastructure projects. Remember the furore more over a decade ago about the routing of a gas pipeline into Co. Mayo from the Corrib offshore field, with delays being caused by exaggerated fears about highly unlikely explosions (which never happened either, of course)?
ADMITTEDLY, our record on large infrastructure projects is not inspiring. The recent controversy over the soaring cost of the National Children’s Hospital fits into a long list of debacles. We could probably live with a cost overrun but memories of a leaking roof delaying the opening of the National Aquatic Centre, leaks in the roof of the Dublin Port Tunnel before it opened and the need to install track reinforcement on some parts of the Luas lines in Dublin not long after they were opened first.
There are ways to deal with all of that. It is most likely that any builders and operators of a nuclear plant would come from the private sector. A strong regulator would put all sorts of fines and punishments in place for any deviations from required standards.
No rational owner of an investment costing billions of euro would knowingly risk losing it through a serious accident or disaster. There are plenty of operators throughout the world who do this type of thing properly.
There are more than 20 plants in the UK, 60 in France and many more in Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany, Finland and Holland. Despite our capacity of self-loathing we have shown that we are the equal of any of those countries when it comes to doing business. We fancy ourselves as good builders. This could be done.
I know the biggest argument against will be what happens to the nuclear waste. New technology however is turning some of that into a renewable in itself. And even if that is not always possible what we do know is that it is near impossible to contain carbon emissions. Think of that the next time you rush to condemn nuclear: it is not the biggest environment culprit, as it has been made out to be. Let’s at least have an honest debate.