Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Ah lads are we genuinely getting into a semantic argument on "coal bad?" now?

People will do anything for an argument on the Internet eh?

Most people agree that Nuclear is good when you already have it too.

What folk have been consistently disagreeing with is that building nuclear is cheap and quick. If Ireland had a glut of resources (and no thats not just €€) e.g nuclear engineers, manufacturing capacity, and experience in building Nuclear, I don't think there would be much push back against Nuclear.

I don't really care about the Nuclear ban to be honest. Like get rid of it if you want, it doesn't really change the fact that the economics of Nuclear are really god damn hard to justify when it won't generate a single kWh of energy for 2-3 decades, meanwhile tying up 10s of bn in euros which could be used to create renewable energy capacity that exists today.

It won't, nor will nuclear though. You will still need gas/oil reserves to fill in the gaps when nuclear has to shut for maintenance which happens reasonably often.

For me, if the choice was to spend 20bn on Nuclear which maybe will start generating energy in 20 years time, or spend 20bn in covering any and every roof in Ireland in solar panels, which will definitely produce energy in 5-6 years, i would choose the latter every day of the week

Do you forsee a scenario where we would build sufficient nuclear to be net zero in 24 years

Sure but generated carbon now is worse than generated carbon later. We will be burning far more fossil fuels if we abandon the drive for renewables now and go for a nuclear power plant which won't be built for a generation leaving us that much more dependent on renewables for a greater period.

Again, I am not opposed to Nuclear in principal, it is just by a long stretch not the fastest way of decarbonising our energy grid at this point.

Remind me how many megawatts of energy Ardnacrusha generated when it opened.

And how long are the UK taking currently to build Hinkley Point C

1. The government was able to do that back then because it basically had 0 other real government priorities. No health budget to speak of, no real rail or infra investment, no public funded secondary or third level education etc I could go on. 2026. This may be a mad thing to say but you can't necessarily adopt the same approach as you did 100 years ago.
2. Again, how long are the Brits taking to build Hinckley, our closest real analogue in terms of how this could be built

We don’t have an offshore industry or even a history of offshore industries like oil or for that matter active offshore wind farms either

We built one of the first off shore wind farms? And we have neighbours who are actively building offshore wind atm.

we built 9GW of “incremental” wind and solar and what do we have to show for it?

We've halved our carbon emissions from electricity since 2016?

What do we do while we wait for your plans to result in lower CO2 energy that is more secure than importing gas? (which at present we seem to be doubling down on :o )

There is currently nothing which we can do to reduce emissions faster than building more renewables. That's just a fact atm, its self evidential given the amount of renewables we've built and, as I've said, how our emissions have halved in 10 years

We commit to Nuclear over Renewables and we will be more dependent on Gas in the near term? Which is probably the only thing which should matter at the moment even if you don't care about emissions.