Dr Paul Dean

Are you among the 50% plus of people apparently now in favour of nuclear energy being created, manufactured or whatever here in Ireland?

That was an Ireland Think survey in the Sunday Independent over the weekend.

We have a Fianna Fáil TD from Cork East, James O'Connor, who is pushing the idea.

He wants to bring forward legislation to get rid of the ban on nuclear in Ireland.

And it seems that Micheál Martin, the Taoiseach, is now interested in examining the nuclear power option.

What do you think?

And let us know what you think when you've heard our next guests.

In a moment, we'll hear from Senator Malcolm Noonan of the Green Party.

But first, Dr. Paul Dean, Senior Lecturer in Clean Energy Futures at UCC.

Aren't America, aren't they in the United States of America, a lot of the tech companies which have the big AI ambitions, aren't they going nuclear, building these little nuclear plants for their needs?

But don't we need to lay the groundwork now, given how slow it is to get anything done in Ireland?

Don't we need to get rid of the legal restriction brought in in 1999, I think, in an act of the Oireachtas, stopping us even discussing nuclear, let alone actually starting work on building one?

It is, because if we've had problems before, like Bella and the boy in bringing in the offshore gas from the Corrib field and the difficulties in getting the planning for that, God knows what it would be like asking anybody in any part of Ireland to live near a nuclear facility.

Okay, Senator Malcolm Noonan of the Green Party, what's your position on, if not immediately because it is impossible immediately, in the future of introducing nuclear to our energy mix?

Sorry, Malcolm, there are people who would say that the stalling had happened previously when the Greens were in power, and it's only in the last year or two that we've actually had anything of an acceleration, given that we had our first offshore wind farms 23 years ago, and nonsense.

But sorry, aren't those historical legacy issues in relation, we keep bringing back to Sellafield and Windscale, which were an issue well before the majority of people listening to this, and even the people in the studio were born

Haven't we got modern technology which has made nuclear an awful lot safer?

And even if there remain issues in relation to how you dispose the spent uranium, isn't this a much more carbon efficient, carbon clean way of generating the power that we need?

Okay, what do you mean by slowing down the economy?

And if you were to say we're opting out of the AI race and we're not going to provide the data centres, would that not risk enormous amount of investment going overseas?