Emmet Oliver in The Irish Times reports that just 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster, a group of scientists, businessmen and academics have set up the Republic’s first campaign group in favour of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power is against the law in Ireland, and they want to change that.
“The nuclear debate in Ireland has been more emotional than rational,” the group said.
Really?
Oscar Wilde described foxhunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. Perhaps nuclear power could be described as the indefensible in pursuit of the uneconomical.
It wasn’t emotion that constructed the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island nuclear plants and it wasn’t emotion that led to both accidents.
As The Irish Times has recorded, the nuclear campaign group includes David Sowby, a doctor and fellow of the Society For Radiological Protection in the UK. He was a former scientific secretary to the International Commission on Radiological Protection between 1962 and 1985;
Philip W Walton, who worked at NUI Galway as Professor of Applied Physics from 1978, where he remained for 27 years, currently retied;
John Stafford, an accountant, business adviser and consultant;
Frank J Turvey, a former assistant chief executive of the Irish Radiological Protection Institute; and Jim Morrissey, who has 15 years’ experience in a nuclear research centre.
Read Ken Livingstone in the London Telegraph making an eminently rational argument against the British Government’s promotion of nuclear power.
Urgency needed on Nuclear Waste: BBC
And if you have half an hour to spare, watch the
BBC World’s report on the Chernobyl Disaster. Just to remind you that Chernobyl was a disaster in the most extreme and irremediable sense of the word, and that it is only luck which has prevented more such disasters.
