Sir, – Anne Bailey (Letters, July 26th) claims that nuclear power could replace natural gas in support of wind and solar. Unfortunately, nuclear power is completely unsuited to taking the role of gas. Gas power plants can be fired up and shut down quickly and hence handle the peaks in demand and even out the variable production from other sources, a feature they share with hydroelectric power.
Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, take up to 24 hours to start up and shut down and can only, like coal, provide a constant output.
We would also have to consider whether we really want to make ourselves dependent on Russia, Kazakhstan and Niger, which are the largest suppliers of uranium to Europe. It is not obvious that Canada and Australia, the other main global suppliers, could expand their production (mostly on indigenous land) sufficiently if there is a major increase in nuclear power worldwide.
Finally, Ireland currently has no nuclear engineering expertise, no courses in nuclear engineering, and very few nuclear physicists who could teach reactor physics – although this problem could probably be dealt with in the 20 years it is likely to take before any nuclear power plant is built. – Yours, etc,
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
Ballsbridge mews formerly home to Irish musician for €1.95m
JON-IVAR SKULLERUD,
Department of Theoretical Physics,
Maynooth University,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.