Attention conservation notice: This is a bit of a rant.

Perhaps I should stay away from environmentalists on radios. They cause stress, as you'll see below. Stress is bad for your health, and environmentalists like this one cause me stress. So environmentalists might be bad for your health, after all.*

I'd written about nuclear power in a previous post, which was research for an upcoming book I'm writing about future prospects for the Irish economy. So, when they asked, I was pretty happy to talk tonight about prospects for nuclear power generation in Ireland.

Listeners on tonight's Last Word programme had a tough time of it: they had to listen to me make a few points about the prospects for nuclear power generation in Ireland, coming on the heels of these reports about the British government's intention to build more nuclear plants around their country. The hapless listeners then had to listen to Richard Boyd Barrett make totally unconnected points to the comments and questions of either myself or the interviewer, again, and, yet again. Mr. Barrett's only point, repeated on message, and ad nauseam (like a true politician), was: nuclear power was bad. Chernobyl. Windscale. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Sadly, no chance of any dialogue when one person has a message, and is on that message.

So, sorry about that, TodayFm listeners.

Here are the points I made:

1. Building a nuclear power plant in Ireland makes no sense, from any angle. In Ireland, we don't have the technical facilities, the equipment, the physical capital, the human capital, or the political will to see a project like this through to completion. It would never be cost effective to send billions of Irish taxpayers' euros to France for the construction of such a plant. Not when several brand new plants will be built not 200 miles from us, paid for by the UK, which we can link a cable to and purchase power from at reasonable rates once those plants come on stream.

2. Buying nuclear-generated electricity made somewhere else makes lots of sense, in the short term. Wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave power combined won't generate enough of Ireland's electricity needs in the next 5-15 years to compensate for the decline in competitiveness which will result from increases in the prices of fossil fuels like coal and oil. We need a stop gap alternative, and that alternative, even environmentalists agree, has to be nuclear power. It is also important to realise that the increase in nuclear power demand means world uranium supplies won't carry us further than 50 years, meaning nuclear power has the same sort of shelf life as coal, oil, and gas.

3. There is no tradeoff between investment in nuclear power and investment in green technologies in Ireland. We barely do either. Frankly, if you go by the level of investment in either sector relative to other highly developed countries like the UK, USA, France, and Germany, the idea of a new and revolutionary idea in any kind of power generation coming from Ireland would be a Black Swan event, something highly unlikely but with great impact. While I do hope this happens, and happens big for Irish entrepreneurs and the Irish economy, I wouldn't bet the farm on the next big thing coming from these shores in either nuclear or 'green' technologies. Sure, Irish companies working in the green technology space have something to add, maybe even something great, but relative to other OECD countries, our levels of investment in either space are just too small to matter. There isn't a tradeoff for the Irish economy in developing these separate energy technologies. Suggesting otherwise is either disingenuous, or plain wrong. As James Lovelock said:

“Nothing works if you don’t have it".

So relax---we won't be building Windscale in Ireland anytime soon. It makes no sense, on any front. Though Mr Barrett didn't seem to know I'd agreed with him before he'd made his singular point. He was also pretty poorly informed, for example, he didn't know Windscale wasn't a power plant, and seemed content to parrot discredited studies (or opinion polls dressed up as studies) about the dangers of nuclear power in Ireland.

* This is almost certainly completely untrue:)