Sir, – I read with interest the case made against a nuclear future for Ireland, built as it was on the more satirical view of our recent record on ha-ha walls and bike sheds (“How can Ireland build a nuclear reactor when it can’t even manage a chidlren’s hospital?,” Opinion, August 3rd). But the argument, though entertaining, sells the State’s underlying capability short.
In 1925 a 26-year-old Irish engineer persuaded a three-year-old, cash-strapped Free State, with no grid, no domestic industrial base and precisely nobody trained in hydroelectric engineering, to commit a fifth of its entire revenue budget to damming the Shannon.
Ardnacrusha was built in four years by bringing in foreign contractors and expertise where we had none. By the time it opened in 1929 it was generating enough power for the whole country, and was the largest plant of its kind on Earth. The lesson from our own history is not that we lack the ambition or the ability to deliver first-of-a-kind infrastructure; it’s that we do have a history of starting projects of such scale from scratch, and can import expertise where we’re short of it ourselves.
Nor is on-time, on-budget delivery some lost art. The national motorway programme rolled out between the mid-1990s and 2010 added roughly 1,000km of road, largely on schedule and on budget. When a project is properly resourced, sequenced and given political cover, we manage it perfectly well.
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On expertise: the article assumes we’d be starting with “precisely zero” nuclear knowledge. We wouldn’t. There is a substantial diaspora of Irish-trained engineers and physicists working across the international nuclear sector, many of whom would relish the chance to bring that experience home to a first Irish programme, just as Siemens’s engineers did at Ardnacrusha a century ago.
Finally, the piece’s four-fifths-of-the-problem argument leans heavily on the demands of a conventional, gigawatt-scale reactor: enormous excavations, bespoke heavy transport, a single monolithic construction sequence. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed specifically to avoid most of that. Built substantially in a factory and shipped to site as prefabricated units, SMRs are intended to cut on-site construction time to a fraction of a conventional build, with a smaller footprint, lower water demand and far less dependence on the kind of bespoke, single-site choreography that sank the national children’s hospital budget. The technology is still young, and unproven at scale, but it is precisely the innovation that addresses the objections raised.
None of this means a reactor is a small undertaking, or that our planning system doesn’t need serious reform to deliver one. But writing off nuclear as beyond Irish capability misreads both our history, our technical ability as a people, the expertise that exists in the country and our diaspora, and where the technology is heading. – Yours, etc,
Eoin Neylon,
Chartered civil/structural engineer,
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society,
Milltown,
Dublin 6.
