"Green" policies are destroying this country

Why does it matter what the greens think of nuclear? They're a tiny minority party that will be gone in next election.

Why aren't people angry with FG and FF for not pushing for nuclear given they're the ones with all the power?

I know this, nuclear will never happen, we can't make a road one way or put in a bus or bike lane without politicians and constituents going into absolute meltdown, never mind a nuclear power plant.

It's just the folks who refuse to be inconvenienced or change their lives in any way always throw out the nuclear line as if it's some panacea for all of our environmental ills. It will never happen in Ireland so it's not even worthy of discussion.

That all sounds grand until there is a peak of demand and people are left without a car. And widespread autonomous cars is not something that will be happening any time soon.

They will just offer free electricity to locals for life and they will ask 'could it not be built a bit quicker?'

There will not be autonomous cars hitting the streets. Full automation would, I believe, require the creation of a true AI with general intelligence, somthing that might be achievd a few centuries after the first manned mission to another solar system arrives at it's destination.

Reality is hitting electricity consumers bank accounts today, and the only trajectory with the current plan is for costs to keep rising until consumers can bear no more. Wind turbines are a low quality generator requiring very costly grid management actions to maintain security of supply. Eventually the public is going to have to chose between between sustainable emissions reductions, the greens failing pet technologies, wind and solar and its contribution to serious economic depression. If you want to see what happens with a mismanaged grid look to South Africa, power cuts are a regular occurrence due to incompetent planning decades ago.

The Irish Governments plan for the rest of the decade is:

• More turbines
• More solar
• More inter-connectors
• More wiring
• 1 million electric cars
• 400,000 heat pumps
• Much more energy tax.
• More subsidies
• More EU economic sanctions.

The catastrophists will always be there. They have a complete record of failure in their predictions and the computer model projections they depend on to generate media headlines lack predictive skill. Net zero will eventually be seen by the greater public as a massive wealth transfer from them with no tangible benefits.

Declaring that 'it makes sense' does not make it so.

Do you honestly think a new nuclear power station would get planning to be built on the Corrib

Or are you talking out of your arse

"I'll finish with this, there is not enough lithium reserves in the world to replace all the passenger cars in the US let alone the rest of the world. All other prime movers will have to remain combustion engines and run on cracked and reformed gas from (sea) water with the energy source for this being a nuclear wind mix."

Lithium is not an extremely rare element. we have enough proven reserves to last decades, and that's without even recovering lithium from recycled materials.

But even with this, Lithium is not going to be the only battery technology powering BEVs, there are already solid state batteries that use different chemistry, as well as Sodium batteries which would replace lithium electrolites with sodium which is so abundant that it's basically infinite (it would be a waste product from deslalinating oceans which solves another problem that climate change is bringing, where to get water to drink when there are intense droughts and glaciers have disappeared)

There are dozens of different battery technologies that are all seeing lots of investment in R&D and will be competing to take over as part of a complex ecosystem of differing technologies

I do think extracting Hydrogen from sea water may be a big part of the energy mix if we can do it using renewable or nuclear energy. Currently a lot of peak wind power that we currently have capacity to generate is simply wasted because there isn't demand for it. If we could use this power to generate hydrogen, this could be used in a multitude of ways to transition away from fossil fuels

Lol. you know nothing about how the world works if you think that's even remotely sensible. They might bribe politicians, but trying to offer locals free electricity in exchange for dropping planning objections would never ever work.

I won't take lectures on reality from someone who doesn't accept that climate change is real thank you very much

As I said yesterday, the radiative imbalance has doubled since 2005, and will be 6 times that by mid century if people like you get your way. Your selfishness and ignorance is matched only by your arrogance to believe that you are more qualified to assess the state of the worlds climate than practically every reputable climate scientist on the planet

Wind is not random. There's a reason wind turbines are built offshore and on the tops of mountains.

Electricity grids always have extra generation capacity relative to peak demand so that they can handle the inevitable downtime for every type of energy generation system

Peak energy demand is only a few hours a day, the rest of the time, there is significant excess capacity in the grid most of the time, so power stations are switched off to save fuel. Wind has the ability to generate fuel during these periods because the marginal cost of generating electricity is practically zero, while fossil fuel and nuclear always have the cost of their fuel and all the associated costs of running their facilities while in operation.

The challenge is to design a robust grid that maximises the energy available when it is abundant rather than trying to manage peak demand by turning off plant and infrastructure, we should be trying to maximise peak supply and use this to release back to the grid when real time supply is lower than peak demand.

Irelands plan is to heavily invest in offshore wind. We currently rely mostly on small onshore wind farms which are much more variable. But our potential lies in offshore generation

But even still

Ireland's peak ever demand was 5,357mw

If Ireland doubles or triples our installed wind generation capacity then we will would have the potential to generate a maximum of 7,182mw - 10,773mw of energy at any given time.

This should allow us plenty of options as a net power generator got the first time in history. If electricity in Europe is going to get so expensive as you claim, Ireland could make a lot of money selling power to Europe.

I was being facetious. I have stated my true opinion in other threads, which is that nuclear waste be dealt with by turning it into synroc - an Australian CSIRO deveolpoed technology in use in Australia, Sellafield and at a national nuclear facility in the US. The resultant synroc is geochemically stable. Store it in caverns in 200-400 million year old salt deposits 3+ km underground.

The fact there are solutions, but a lack of action to impliment them, suggests governemnts don't want to deal with the problem currently because it's not perceived to be enough of a problem.