The British government's announcement yesterday that it plans a new generation of nuclear power stations to replace the existing plants, which provide some 20 per cent of its energy, has been well flagged. Nuclear energy emits radically less carbon than coal or gas, so it is not surprising that its contribution to the target of cutting these emissions to the Kyoto target of 60 per cent by 2060 should be put in the foreground.
Greenhouse gas induced climate change has led governments the world over to revise their attitudes towards nuclear energy, a change that is reinforced by growing worries about becoming dependent on oil and gas. Realistically, they say, renewables and energy saving do not offer an alternative.
Ireland is directly exposed to the consequences of this decision because the extra nuclear waste produced will be reprocessed at Sellafield and a number of the new plants will be located in western Britain. The task of managing this waste is passed on not only to future generations but to those living adjacent to what has proved to be a seriously lax management regime at the Sellafield plant. Ireland's pronounced opposition to it and the Government's persistent calls that it be closed now face a much steeper and more difficult path. The British decision will feed in to the Government's choice on how to pursue this objective. Following the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice that Ireland was wrong to take a legal case to the United Nations before pursuing the issue through that court, it must now decide what to do.
The issue is made more complex by our own ballooning dependence on fossil fuels and the growing energy interdependency between Ireland and Britain. An electricity interconnector is to be built to increase energy security. This means we will become clients of Britain's nuclear power industry. Many believe it is hypocritical to oppose nuclear power in principle in the light of these changing circumstances. That is not necessarily so, since the fundamental matter of whether nuclear energy is justified must be distinguished from the Sellafield plant's efficiency and whether it illegally pollutes the Irish Sea. To be consistent, the Government should now prepare a substantive case on nuclear waste and the marine environment to put before the European Court of Justice, drawing on the relevant body of EU law. If that fails it is on firmer legal ground to renew the case it took about pollution before the Law of the Sea Tribunal in Hamburg.
The other policy point arising relates to how Ireland itself proposes to meet the (anyway quite inadequate) Kyoto target. We depend on fossil fuels for 95 per cent of our energy, 90 per cent of which is imported, and have become the ninth most oil-dependent state in the world. Transport makes up an inordinate 40 per cent proportion of that total, because of a huge increase in car dependency. It is certainly hypocritical to denounce the British for choosing nuclear energy if we fail to tackle this growing problem by sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels, increasing renewables and finding alternatives.