It was Ireland’s equivalent to Woodstock. Tens of thousands came from all over the country and camped out in the mud and wind and rain for days on Carnsore Point, in Co Wexford.
Artists as diverse as Christy Moore and Chris De Burgh entertained them. Resistance was in the air and all the talk was of keeping Ireland nuclear-free, of alternative societies and how we might create one here.
It was an historic movement that involved protests all over the country by local nuclear groups, culminating in the celebrated Carnsore festival. And it worked. The then Minister responsible for hte nuclear plan, Dessie O’Malley, eventually backed down and the plan to locate a nuclear facility in Wexford was abandoned.
You would think it unimaginable then that, a mere 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster, 25 years after Carnsore and just over half a century after the devastation wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, politicians and policy advisors in Ireland would be seriously proposing to go down the path of developing nuclear reactors. Well, think again, folks…
Forfás, the Irish Government agency responsible for providing policy advice on enterprise, trade and science recently published a report assessing Ireland’s problem of oil dependency. The report suggests that, to meet our energy needs: “Ireland should consider the possibility of developing nuclear energy as a long-term solution.”
The Forfás report notes that we are extremely vulnerable to a sudden decrease in oil supply or to oil prices reaching unaffordable levels.
In truth, the facts are chastening. Ireland consumed 9 million tonnes of oil in 2004, double what was used in 1990. In 2002, Ireland ranked 3rd highest among the EU-25 countries in terms of oil consumed per capita. The huge increase in the number of cars on the road was one cause. The amount of oil consumed for transportation in Ireland tripled between 1972 and 2002. The use of oil to generate electricity was another.
But it isn’t just policy advisors who are pushing the nuclear agenda. The Government itself has been getting in on the act. In fact the Forfás report followed a recent decision by the Irish Government not to oppose nuclear power at the European Council and instead to support the European Council’s call for a new generation of nuclear power plants. Such a pro-nuclear stance on the part of the Irish Government appears to be in complete contradiction of both its stated opposition to the Sellafield nuclear plant and its claim that it promotes an anti-nuclear proliferation policy at an international level.
Commentators too have been raising the stakes. In a recent article in the Sunday Business Post, David McWilliams argued that it’s time for Ireland to go nuclear.
“We should open our minds to the possibility that nuclear power is part of the energy solution, not part of the problem. Nuclear power is safe...In 2020, there is every possibility that we will be a nuclear state and, if not, we will definitely be importing nuclear energy from elsewhere,” he wrote.
He went on to argue that “even in the worst case scenario, the impact of a nuclear accident is localised, whereas the impact of global warming and air pollution from burning fossil fuels affects the whole planet. This seems harsh, but it is true.”
As the fella said, tell that to the people of Chernobyl. And Dundalk, where doctors discovered disease patterns in cancer patients which were similar to those in patients exposed to radiation after the Chernobyl disaster. These included high levels of stillbirths, miscarriages, birth defects and alarming rates of cancer, which were attributed to the effects of the fire at what was then called the Windscale Nuclear Plant in 1957. Dundalk, of course, has one of the highest cancer rates in the country. A local doctor Dr Mary Grehan reflected: “We do not know what the cause of the problem is but when you look at the list of possibilities, the Sellafield Plant sticks out like a sore thumb.”
Greenpeace have been campaigning for decades against the use of nuclear power. They point to victims of nuclear disasters like Annya, who was born in 1990 in a village highly contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986.
A cancerous brain tumour at the age of four marked the end of Annya’s childhood. Since then she has known nothing but pain and illness. Now 15 and bed-ridden, she has spent her life going in and out of hospital, between tumours and life support. Every 15 minutes of every night, she must be turned in order to prevent bedsores. Annya’s is just one story. In Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and beyond, there are hundreds of thousands of people who lost any chance of a normal life as a result of nuclear disaster.
Pat Finnegan, co-ordinator of the Irish environmental organisation Ghrian, insists that, quite apart from the safety arguments, there are other reasons not to go nuclear.
First, he says, there are issues of peace and security: just look at the current conflict in Iraq, which is essentially about oil, and the looming disaster as the US prepares to launch nuclear strikes against Iran. “Can you imagine global conflict over scarce wind resources?” he asks rhetorically.
Secondly, while McWilliams and others point to nuclear power as “a logical alternative” to carbon emissions from fossil fuels, Pat believes that problems within the French nuclear system confirm that nuclear power is not a straightforward solution to climate change.
In 2003, during the heat wave in France, as the demand from air cooling systems on the French grid approached dangerous levels, the French government took a call from state-owned operator Electricity de France (EDF) telling them EDF would have to start shutting down nuclear capacity within 18 hours if temperature limits on discharge of reactor cooling water were to be respected.
The heat wave had caused the rivers on which EDF usually relied for cooling both to lose volume and to increase in temperature. An emergency, teleconferenced, Cabinet decision changed the law and raised the temperature limits overnight.
 That kept the air conditioning on until the heat wave passed. But what effect it had on safety margins remains unclear. How close France came to nuclear disaster will never be known. Then, in early 2005, the French government ordered EDF not to close any of its nuclear stations that year for scheduled maintenance in order to ensure capacity in another heat wave.
 The power stayed on – but at what price in the future if maintenance schedules and therefore, presumably, safety limits are to be prejudiced?
Finnegan insists that the future does not depend on a false choice between staying in the frying pan with fossil fuels and climate change, or jumping into the fire with nuclear energy. Ghrian argues that all our future energy needs can be quite adequately met using indigenous renewable resources, based on a completely different system, oriented at connecting small scale, locally generated and locally consumed renewable energies on a network basis. In particular they believe that wind energy, wave and solar power can be effectively harnessed.
However the ESB is currently restricted both by EU legislation and by the Government from developing such energies. Instead the development of renewables has been handed over to the private sector. But profits are hardly guaranteed – making this a case where the State should be leading the way in investing in alternatives.
Greenpeace pleads that “you need to speak out and say ‘no more nuclear, no more Chernobyls’. If you don’t, who will?” They have a point.
Sellafield still operates only miles from our shores – leaving us wide open to a potential risk. The US is threatening to launch a nuclear war on Iran – and now there are proposals to build nuclear reactors here in Ireland.
25 years on from Carnsore, it looks as if Greenpeace may be more right than ever. High time to unpack those tents, tune those guitars and get out on the streets. We may have a fight on our hands.