Dáil to consider ending Ireland’s ban on nuclear power

A couple of weeks back I noted that moves were afoot in the Oireachtas to end Ireland’s historic prohibition of nuclear power, on the foot of the Electricity Regulation (Removal of Nuclear Fission Prohibitions) Bill 2026 which was submitted to the Oireachtas Bills Office.

Ireland banned electricity generation from nuclear fission with the passage of the Electricity Regulation Act 1999 (section 12, paragraph 6). During the 1960s and 1970s, adoption of nuclear power was under active consideration in Ireland and had supporters at cabinet level. The settling of the oil crisis and the advent of cheap gas, as well as incidents such as the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, served to dampen enthusiasm for the idea. I am not sure how the one-line prohibition came to be in the Act (a trawl of the Oireachtas debates at the time was inconclusive) but I suspect it was considered appropriate given Ireland’s opposition to the THORP facilities in operation at Sellafield and concerns over their effects on the Irish Sea.

The Irish government has, in recent days, confirmed to the Oireachtas that there are currently no plans to authorise a nuclear power plant within the State (this line of questioning suggests that Sinn Féin oppose any changes to the law). However, it seems clear that the Government intends to keep its options open to the possibility of greenlighting one in future.

I’ve written previously here that I’m a big advocate of nuclear energy, and it could be transformative within Ireland. To understand why, we need to look at Ireland’s electricity supply and demand situation as it stands today.

The RoI has around 7GW of gas, coal and oil plants installed. The vast bulk of this generation capacity is gas-fired with the option of firing distillate oil (essentially diesel) as a backup. A further 5.5GW of renewable energy exists, 4GW of which is wind, with the bulk of the remainder being hydro.

(when considering the nameplate capacity of renewables, it is important to be aware that the ‘capacity factor’ ie the real world output is significantly lower. This is because most renewable sources are intermittent depending on the weather. Today at lunchtime, for example, Ireland’s grid demand is 4.5GW, but only 1.2GW approx is coming from renewables. Sunny weather, like today, often coincides with low wind production.)

On the demand side, flicking through Eirgrid’s data I see a peak demand of just under 8GW during the winter months of 2025-26. This is dangerously close to the combined dispatchable power capacity on the grid, which explains why Eirgrid have described the situation as “challenging“. A freak combination of high demand and low renewable output could exceed the grid’s ability to meet the demand. Provisions such as the Interconnector upgrades between Ireland, the UK and the continent will go some way to ameliorating this risk in the short and medium term but Ireland will also have to look at increasing its generation capacity.

Some of the issue here is the rising demand of datacentres, calculated to account for 21% of demand (this will be rising dramatically with the ongoing adoption of AI). Activists have been campaigning against these datacentres, highlighting that unlike most energy-intensive industries they are largely automated and provide few jobs or other benefits to the economy. This is a problem not unique to Ireland, and the government will have to find a way to balance its role as a friend to global technology industry while dealing with the environmental and economic impact of these facilities.

The quick and cheap way out is to increase gas or oil provision. But this does nothing to address dependency on imported energy, nor on climate and pollution considerations. Renewables such as wind farms are cheap in terms of their nameplate capacity, but have a low capacity factor due to the intermittent nature of the weather; there are also supply challenges around rare-earth metals and copper, and environmental concerns due to the requirements for construction material and disposal of the turbines when life-expired. Despite propaganda to the contrary, solar performance is poor during the winter months. Those who believe that a country’s energy demands can be met exclusively by renewable sources, with the gaps being closed by batteries, are propagating a dangerous myth which will endanger the electricity supply security of any country that goes down this road.

Nuclear energy proposes a way to solve all of these problems, but at costs which need to be considered carefully.

The massive capital costs of the UK’s recent nuclear stations are too great for a smaller country like Ireland to justify. The UK has problems scaling up megaprojects such as the new nuclear plants at Hinckley Point and Sizewell, and HS2 – although the reactor designs under construction today also ran into significant overruns in other countries where they were used. In any case, as a much smaller country Ireland does not need the kind scale that full size plants are intended to provide. Ireland – and everyone else – should learn from the expense associated with the UK tying itself in knots to try to build these projects with private finance.

Recent developments in nuclear power technology show a lot of promise. The Small Modular Reactor (SMR) initiatives in progress around the world, including in the UK, are an attempt to address the up-front economic hit of building a nuclear power station by reducing the reactor components in size such that they can be manufactured on an off-site production line, unlike modern reactors which must be essentially constructed in-place. For this idea to work, there needs to be a demand pipeline; but with that in place, it is expected that it should be possible to build a new 500MW power station for around £3bn. By comparison, building a gas-fired station with the same capacity is around £1bn.

It’s still three times more expensive to build a nuclear plant with the same nameplate capacity, which is not an obvious economic benefit. The savings lie in the plant’s low operating cost. The ten-year cost of keeping the gas powered plant running is, on the back of an envelope, around £2bn assuming consistent gas prices at the level before the recent Iran war. Over the same time period, the SMR would need to be refuelled around 6-7 times (nuclear power reactors generally hold enough fuel to run for 18 months without stopping) and would cost around £260m in fuel. After 50 years – assuming these plants can be life-extended in the same way that legacy PWRs have been – you’ve paid around £4.3bn in today’s money, as opposed to £11bn for your gas station. At the same time, you’re decoupled from supply risk, you’ve cut your carbon output to zero and benefitted citizens and businesses with stable energy costs.

The other issue that people highlight is the question of the nuclear waste. People picture barrels with luminous green sludge leaking out and killing everything surrounding it. In reality, the largest nuclear plants produce a few tons of spent fuel per year, compared with a coal plant that produces hundreds of thousands of tons of ash as well as ejecting carbon dioxide, sulfur, heavy metals such as arsenic and lead, and even low-level radioactive materials into the atmosphere – in fact, coal plants in normal operation release significantly more radioactivity into the environment than their nuclear competitors do. In Ireland’s case, the spent nuclear fuel would be sealed into drums sent to France for reprocessing; a solution would need to be found to store the returned waste safely.

Given that Ireland is positioned adjacent to two friendly countries with mature nuclear power industries – the UK and France – it can draw on nuclear engineering experience, source and stockpile fuel, and export its spent fuel for reprocessing. With the co-operation of the international nuclear authorities, it can ensure that it follows global best practice, and by importing fuel from friendly countries rather than having to refine it directly it will avoid any nuclear proliferation concerns.

I support the decision of the government to look at repealing the prohibition. I look forward to a future – perhaps 20-25 years from now – where there is an estate of modular reactors operating alongside Ireland’s defunct gas power stations, cleaning up the air and keeping Ireland’s high-tech sector competitive.