Surrealing in the Years: Come on guys, we don't have it in the locker to pull off nuclear energy

BETWEEN THE COST of fuel, the permanent threat of marine warfare in the Persian Gulf, and now the risk of contagious and deadly viruses causing a month-long state of cabin fever quarantine, it’s been a bad couple of months for the cruise ship industry. 

Without wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, and with the heavy caveat that I am whatever the opposite of an expert is when it comes to epidemiology, I do not like the look of this hantavirus thing. 

Granted, my main fear is the name of the thing. Hantavirus. That’s a little too memorable for my taste, a little too snappy. Like they want us to remember it. Like it might be making a reappearance in the coming months. Sort of like a Chekhov’s cruise ship rat virus. 

As of this week, the WHO has reassured us that the risk of hantavirus to the public at large is nothing like that of Covid. Which is fortunate, because I’d been really trying to get this whole ‘Surrealing in the Years Cruise Ship Tour’ off the ground this summer, and I was getting worried that prospective buyers would be hesitant.

But of course, then there are the fuel costs. Irish ferry companies confessed this week that they are monitoring the war in Iran closely as to how it may affect their price structure due to the global shortage of oil. Fortunately, our Taoiseach Micheál Martin has been thinking long and hard about how Ireland can wean itself off the oily teat upon which we’ve become so reliant. Sorry for using the phrase ‘oily teat’. But it’s true!

In the past week, Martin has twice said that Ireland should examine the role that nuclear power could play in our energy future, including even building a nuclear power plant itself.

That’s right, folks. A nuclear power plant for Ireland. Sure, it’s taken 21 years for Metrolink to go from its conception to whatever stage comes between conception and anything actually happening, but sure, we could try our hands at nuclear energy. 

It’s an interesting about-face, with the production of nuclear energy currently prohibited in Ireland since 1999. One unverifiable theoretical framework as to why we’ve previously been hesitant might include our heightened awareness of the Chernobyl disaster, thanks to the charitable efforts of Adi Roche, the founder of Chernobyl Children International, and the subsequent presence of Chernobyl survivors in Ireland. 

For those too young to remember the horror of Chernobyl, this was compounded by the Shut Down Sellafield campaign — a 2002 initiative helmed by Ali Hewson — which saw primary school children across Ireland fed nightmare scenarios about meltdowns and radioactive waste before being dragooned into writing letters to Tony Blair begging him to close the Sellafield station. Which he did, to be fair, and the site is expected to be decommissioned in 2120, because it turns out decommissioning a nuclear power plant is, like, hard. Hopefully nothing else about nuclear energy is hard or we could hit some snags. 

Advertisement

Lastly, for a long time, Irish households had very few television channels, and thus one of the few TV shows we were universally exposed to before the year 2000 was The Simpsons. This means the only nuclear safety technician that virtually any of us have ever been aware of is, of course, Homer Simpson, the only nuclear plant operator we’ve ever known is Mr Burns, and our very model of what to expect from nuclear energy is the town of Springfield.

But from the Irish perspective, the reason not to prioritise nuclear energy isn’t that it’s dangerous (though it might well be), but rather that we simply don’t have it in the locker to pull off nuclear energy. 

Far be it from this column to inject a dose of reality into proceedings — usually it’s the other way around — but who out there is watching us fail to implement debit card payments on our buses for the last 15 years straight and thinking ‘As soon as we can take our top guys off this job, nuclear power will be a doddle’?

We’re about as likely to land someone on the moon as we are to successfully design, commission and build a functional nuclear power plant, let alone the infrastructure that would be needed to distribute the energy. We’re talking about a country wherein a hospital that we were told was 99% complete over a year ago is actually getting further away from opening each passing day. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, I’m just saying that we won’t be able to do it. The only thing we’re really any good at building these days is data centres, which is funny, since they use up roughly a quarter of our energy anyway. If we stopped building those we wouldn’t even need the nuclear power plant!

And what makes all of this so infuriating is that when we actually invest in renewable energy instead, we do it relatively well. The share of renewable energy sources used in the generation of electricity in Ireland has increased from an average of 5.1% in 1990-1994 to 40.2% in 2024, according to the CSO. 

Simple as it might sound, we have a lot of wind! You know what we don’t really have? A successful track record of building complicated infrastructure. We miss our housing targets so badly and so consistently that one of the chief spokes of our latest housing policy initiative was just ‘No more targets’. We can’t stop ourselves from paying over the odds for a bike shed (though, please, let’s not make a bigger deal of that than it is this time). The Metrolink remains a mirage on the horizon, and the children’s hospital would almost certainly have been built faster if it had simply been assigned to a local school as an ongoing Transition Year project. Yes, even taking into account that they would take summers and Christmases off and they’d have to fit it in around their school musical. 

What about this state of affairs would make anybody think that nuclear power — something more expensive and more complicated than any hospital, train or indeed bike shed — would be the moment where we finally exorcise these demons and come into our own? You know what we can do? Windmills. 

The whole conversation is such a waste of time, and it’s not hard to imagine that’s what Micheál Martin is going for. Sort of like the conversational equivalent of red tape. Of course we could steer the public conversation in the direction of energy initiatives that are already working, that will be completed faster, that have proven themselves to be reliable. 

Or instead, we can put the brakes on. We can maintain the status quo just that little bit longer. Persist with our reliance on oil until there really is no alternative. Avoid tough decisions in favour of hypothetical scenarios that would take decades upon decades to complete, even in the best case scenario — something which has never befallen a major Irish infrastructure project, ever. 

Who’s to say how such a project might fare under a different government, with a different vision for how Ireland produces and uses its energy, and handles its major infrastructural projects? But a change in direction on that front is even harder to imagine. That’s the real nuclear option. 

Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.
Learn More Support The Journal