"Green" policies are destroying this country

I haven't read Ryan's legislation, so I could be totally wrong, but if I was ER, I would be legislating for what the minimum requirements for what qualifies as CCS

And then Industry will need to meet those standards if they want to exempt themselves from carbon taxes and fines

If CCS is an onerous standard, ie, you need to capture the carbon in a measurable and demonstrable way, prove that you've captured it. and then store it in a way that will not see that carbon released back into the atmosphere for a minimum length of time, then fine, let Industry do that, if they can do it economically, then it's win, win. If they can't do it economically, then alternative practises that cut CO2 emissions at source instead of trying to capture them will win out in the medium to long term.

There's no harm in having multiple competing strategies, but ONLY if there are measures in legislation to prevent companies from falsifying their emissions and mechanisms for punishing those who are trying to game the system in bad faith.

Ultimately, if there is a value to storing captured carbon in a measurable and provable way, then there should be opportunities for businesses to take advantage of this new market. But only if it is suitably regulated. If you can prove that you're capturing and storing x tonnes of Carbon for x length of time, then you should be able to sell that on the carbon credit marketplace. But those need to be difficult standards to achieve or else it will just be a free for all and the whole thing will fall apart

Until it turns out that the cure is worse than the disease. Then alternative practices that don't cut CO2 emissions at all will win out. As we are seeing.

Electricity only accounts for 25% of residential energy use and 12.5% of total energy use.

Oil remains the dominant source of residential energy demand in 2021, and accounted for 41% of all home energy use, followed by electricity at 25% and gas at 19%. (Source: SEAI 2022)

Wind provides 33% of electricity (source Wind Energy Ireland), therefore just 8% of residential energy and 4% of total energy.

The majority of our emissions savings come from transitioning to natural gas, not renewables.

You mean someone like Eamon Ryan and his latest brainfart on carbon capture ?

Not really, and definitely not if you believe Eamon Ryan`s latest on carbon capture on top of his offshore wind and hydrogen make any financial sense towards solving the problem.

You said, "I find it much easier to to listen to a source that understands the issues at hand and has no axe to grind"

It appears that you do not have much faith in Eamon Ryan or the Green Party having any practical answers for dealing with the issues. Or indeed much faith that their ideological axe grinding will help on the issues.

Either that or you do know that their proposed solutions are economic financial suicide, but are still choosing to believe in their understanding of the issues contrary to all evidence.

So neither Eamon Ryan or the Green Party are a source you listen to when it comes to understanding the issues. Fair enough.

Whatever about understanding the issues, a good policy especially with their axe grinding when it comes to having any financially practical answers

Excellent set of data on the capital costs of nuclear from Britain Remade on substack:

Included is a database of ~50 nukes, four fifths of them constructed since 2000, which The Honest Broker substack compiled into this chart of constant 2023 US$m/MW:

Recent US and UK nukes are clearly super-expensive. Part of the problem is the atrophying of nuclear industry expertise in those countries, the construction of first-of-a-kind plants, and the complex regulatory environment -- the 44,000-page environmental impact assessment for Sizewell C is more than 30 times longer than the complete works of Shakespeare!

It's estimated that an extensive building program could reduce nth-of-a-kind costs to a quarter of recent prices. Recent project timelines are also dominated by planning and financing phases which, for example, took ten years for Hinkley C. Other countries do not have these problems:

South Korea in particular, with a continuous building program since the 1980s, can construct plants at $2-4m/MW and in under five years. Looking at individual plant costs shows how recent plants in the UK (Hinkley C) and US (Vogtle) spun out of control, as well as other plants based on the new EDF EPR and Westinghouse AP-1000 designs:

At COP28 the US called for, and 22 countries have pledged, a tripling of installed nuclear by 2050, amounting to 30GW of new capacity per year. We know it can be done, because it already has been in the 1980s. I would hazard a guess that this target can be beaten if the will was there.

The comparable wind power capital costs are $1.5m/MW for onshore wind, $3.9m/MW for fixed bottom offshore, and $5.6m/MW for floating offshore. Those are 2021 prices (source US NREL, pdf link). Costs could be lower for larger turbines. It's likely that both wind and nuclear costs have been inflated since then. However, taking into account that wind capacity factor is 40% compared to 90+% for nuclear, that the wind output is intermittent, and that there are costs associated with wind other than capital cost of construction, it's more than possible that nuclear baseload power could be considerably cheaper than wind.

However, not wanting to sugarcoat it, it would need a concerted collaboration between government and industry for lower nuclear costs to materialise over a number of years. The fact of the matter is that no single technology is going to be a magic bullet for reducing carbon emissions. We need them all, and more. (30GW/year is a drop in the ocean compared to 2GW/day needed for net zero by 2050 which, fortunately, we can afford to miss). Most of all we need them to be way cheaper, because no amount of hysterical greenies is going to make climate concerns trump economics for the developing economies that will be the source of new energy demand in the coming years.

That's very interesting. I look forward to seeing your evidence -- you do have some? Kind of odd, seeing as South Korean heavy engineering is world renowned, for instance they build 40% of the entire world's shipping. But I'm sure you wouldn't just be making stuff up, right?

As I've said before, I'd happily have a nuke in my back yard. Others may differ, and our cadre of screaming hysterical lefties almost certainly will. However, Ireland really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if we build nukes or not. It doesn't matter if we burn coal for everything. It doesn't matter to anyone but us if we knacker the economy with madcap wind and hydrogen. We simply don't count in the overall scheme of things.

Not to mention that the UK just entered a partnership on civil nuclear cooperation with South Korea, and KEPCO just signed an MOU on exploring the construction of a large nuke in the UK. (It seems the poster didn't even bother to read the links before criticising them).

Unless there is a multi-reactor building program that makes use of a single cookie-cutter design, nuclear power is a money pit. The UK's AGR program had each plant being essentially a one-off project by a different consortium, and quite a few were a decade behind schedule.

On the contrary, if South Korea built 20 million nukes the world's decarbonisation issue would be solved. Stranded regions like Ireland could keep doing the sensible thing and just burn natural gas. It would make all the difference in the world to our grid, as long as we overcame the stupid arrogance that makes us imagine we matter to the global situation.

I don't live in China or India.

You claimed on another thread to have invested in Solar PV and on this thread you are asking why bother to invest in climate change nonsense. Something is not really adding up?