Well would you ?

47 comments
  1. How is it that Finland with a population close in size to our own is constructing its fourth nuclear reactor but just impossible for us to do so?

  2. It’s not the resulting nuclear power plant that I would have the problem with. It would be the planning, the petty politics, the sheer fucking cluelessness of people and an incompetent government that would make a bunch of useless committees of busybodies that would make the whole undertaking last a decade longer than it would in another country.

    That and the infrastructure changes that would need to be made in preparation for and after a nuclear powerplant going online and supplying the national grid. We can’t even build a fucking children’s hospital on schedule. Not a hope we could achieve a nuclear power plant here though I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.

  3. I foresee nuclear technicians getting hot tea and biscuit crumbs spilled into the reactor controls.

    Seriously, Ireland is such a small geographic country that if there ever were a nuclear accident the whole island might become uninhabitable. Let’s stick with coal, oil, and the occasional windmill instead.

  4. It’s a hard investment to make at this stage. May aswell go the windmill route until solar energy gets to a more efficient point. We’re blessed to be in a spot where we don’t get crazy natural disasters, we should take advantage of that. Playing my own devils advocate here for a second, that would also be a point towards nuclear energy. The risk factors involved in nuclear energy are really low in modern times but the government would never be able to band together to get such a large project off the ground. Aside from that there’s the actual physics involved. How many nuclear physicist’s or specialists does Ireland have? How efficiently can we resource the materials and elements needed? How do we dispose of the waste in a safe manner? Is it more or less expensive than filling the ocean with wind turbines? There’s alot of factors and variables to consider before anything can be done. We’re such a small island that I’m not sure we could afford a slip up with nuclear fission.

  5. Just fucking make the power plant at this point, were already fucked might aswell try some last ditch effort

  6. Yup, absolutely. We have one of the most educated populations in the world. We’re next door to a nuclear power with years of experience and experienced people to work on it. Incidentally, we get plenty of brits migrating here so that shouldn’t be an issue. Importantly, we have fuck all natural disasters in this country so the only real risk with nuclear power is political, e.g. running a plant 20 years longer than it’s supposed to be. Make that hard legislation and you’ve got my vote.

    And before anyone says it to me, _we can generate more energy than we need and sell it_. Building nuclear does not preclude pursuing wind also.

  7. No. If that thing blows the whole country could be screwed.
    We’re to small of a country we may never recover. Not to mention how clueless our government are.

  8. People are assuming the Government would be involved. I’m sure they would to some degree but chances are this would be managed by Eirgrid/ESB overseen by the energy regulator rather then direct government involvement. I can still see problems there, but not on the scale of any public projects.

  9. I’d trust Ireland to manage it competently more than I would the vast majority of other countries. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be without its problems

  10. Of course. We’re not a backwater country. We have a highly educated population and money to attract talent, so of course we could operate a nuclear plant to the best standards.

    The question is how long would to take to build and at what cost?

  11. It would be faster to encourage Northern Ireland to build a Nuclear Power Plant and then wait for a United Ireland to happen, than to wait for our Government to build one themselves.

  12. I feel like most things it would just go to shit… Mediocre intentions followed by haphazard maintenance and based on past experiences I wouldn’t be surprised if they lost the fecking thing somehow

  13. Absolutely. Ireland has an incredibly talented pool of engineers and scientists.

    The problem would be the corrupt councils, the contractors cutting corners and the dirty and corrupt politics that would definitely be involved.

    We have capable people, but we would almost certainly have huge issues with the top level management being dodgy, nepotistic or just ignorant to the needs of the plant.

  14. I know this is Waterford whispers .. but honestly nuclear is what we need. 2 small reactors and we are comfortably covering Irelands electricity needs with a lot of excess available for export to Europe and / or UK.

    Nuclear power is carbon free (outside of uranium extraction ).

    The main challenges are 1) safety ensuring we don’t have Chernobyl or Japan style accident ever. And 2) waste disposal.

    Costs: Nuclear power stations pay for themselves in the long run just need some up front Capitol.

  15. Yes. I would.

    They’re extraordinarily safe in the modern period. We’ve a location almost entirely free of natural disasters and extreme tectonic activity.
    Given China’s recent leap towards cracking Nuclear Fusion it’s now affording the possibility of incredibly clean , almost infinite power to feed an ever increasing demand for electricity.

    Nuclear power is in my opinion the only thing that’s going to turn the tide in the current climate emergency.

    One of the key barriers to this is the absence of any history of this kind of project here. However we now live in a global society and experts can be brought in from all over the world to oversee and plan its planning and construction. In the time it’d take to build we’d have at least a decade to train up students to a level where they can operate the plant.

    It’s really the worlds best hope at reducing carbon emissions.
    Seeing Germany decommission a number of plants in recent years is absolutely insane. They’ve had to spark back up coal burning plants in order to make up the deficit to the grids demand.

    France gets about 85% of its electricity from their nuclear plants. If that was mirrored across the world we’d go a long way to reversing the devastation caused by generations of environmental apathy.

  16. To be fair, we run hundreds of very high risk chemical, biotech and all sorts of other facilities to amongst the highest and most incident free level in the world and have one of the lowest industrial / work place accident rates in the EU. We’ve very high safety standards in a whole load of areas, including very low road fatalities, although we seem to imagine the opposite is true.

    I’m not sure I would particularly want a nuclear power plant, but if we did build one I would be confident that it would be run extremely well and probably built to the highest spec possible.

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