Connect: This is a good time for the nuclear energy lobby. Oil costs have risen prohibitively and there's much talk about how finite the supply is anyway. Oil is also, it's claimed, unlike nuclear power, contributing to global warming. It won't last indefinitely so it's prudent, even necessary, to consider alternative energy sources.
That, at least, is what pro-nuclear lobbyists have been saying. Perhaps they're right. There's Chernobyl, of course, and Three Mile Island and Sellafield - names practically guaranteed to frighten the public away from nuclear energy. RTÉ's Fallout drama, produced in faux-documentary style and screened this week, will have added to public concern about the safety of nuclear power.
Consider the climate of opinion 10, 20, 30 and even more years ago. For a generation or so, nuclear power has barely featured on the Irish political agenda. As long ago as 1968, the ESB announced plans for a 650 megawatt nuclear plant at Carnsore Point in Co Wexford. Hippies, greens and sundry concerned citizens demonstrated successfully and by 1974 the idea was dropped.
Twelve years later, Chernobyl blew up and that surely - or so it seemed - would put an end to speculation about an Irish nuclear power station. Well, it hasn't, even if in the 20 years since, the word "Chernobyl" has come to represent a nightmare for people opposed to nuclear power. Now that word is being reassessed and massaged. Was it really all that bad? A United Nations report on Chernobyl was published last year. "While it shows that the accident was a human tragedy and has caused major disruption to the normal life of the region, it also made clear that effects on health and environment were significantly less severe than initially predicted," former president of the University of Limerick, Ed Walsh, wrote this week in The Irish Times.
Walsh also criticised "wild media reports" suggesting that accounts of between 10,000 and 100,000 deaths inflicted "serious psychological scars".
He cited the UN report "establishing" that a total of a mere 56 people had died from the results of nuclear radiation since the accident in 1986 and anyway, 47 of those deaths were suffered by emergency workers during the fire's first day.
Yet Walsh argues: "If the Chernobyl incident never occurred, some 100,000 people in the area studied could be expected to die of cancer in the normal course of events. The UN team estimate that it is possible some 4 per cent of these deaths could be attributed to the Chernobyl accident." Four per cent of 100,000 is still 4,000 and that's more than 70 times greater than 56.
It appears then that "wild media reports" are used by both sides to this debate. That's a major part of the problem because few people - even experts differ hugely - can be expected to understand the intricacies of nuclear power. What we are witnessing is yet another debate mired in PR, in which pro and anti lobbyists attempt to influence public opinion by prioritising selective arguments.
On Tuesday, Fintan O'Toole's column in this newspaper was headlined: Nuclear power not an option.
"It is not just hysteria that makes people fear the consequences of a nuclear accident," he wrote. "Such accidents have happened before and they will happen again."
The following day, Ed Walsh's article was headlined: Nuclear energy "the safest of all".
Who to believe? Well, Walsh directed an energy research laboratory in the US of the 1960s. That gives him a form of expertise, but it also makes him an insider and raises the argument that he may be an undue apologist for nuclear energy. He might still be right, of course, but the record of, for instance, the British nuclear industry, when it comes to promoting itself, is abject.
It may well be that anti-nuclear activists have exaggerated estimates of Chernobyl casualties. Conversely, of course, it may equally well be that the pro-nuclear lobby has minimised Chernobyl casualties. The discrepancy between 100,000 and 56 is ludicrous: one figure is almost 1,800 times greater than the other so clearly, at least somebody is fantasising.
Ireland's pro-nuclear lobby is piggy-backing on Tony Blair's belief that nuclear power is ideal to alleviate Britain's looming energy crisis. Urged by business people, Blair favours building more nuclear power stations. "This government is going to have to hold a proper constructive debate on nuclear power," said Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).
The CBI is a business lobby outfit. Ed Walsh too has an aggressively pro-business record. It appears then that business is driving the renewed attempt to get nuclear power back on the political agenda. It has every right to, of course, but when business cloaks its arguments as being essentially for the common good rather than the sectional good generated by profits, we should beware.
Still, in terms of the economic arguments, perhaps Walsh is right. In terms of social arguments however, it seems that O'Toole is wiser. We don't have any right to risk destroying chunks of the planet for hundreds of thousands of years.
We simply don't. It is not neo-Luddite to oppose nuclear power even though the short-sighted insist it is.