Nuclear - future for Ireland?

I was refering to their own french fleet, I don't think they have anything to do with the historic British fleet. I think the government are entirely on the hook for those.

Meanwhile the Chinese nuclear "renaissance" that get the fluffers here so excited has more or less ground to a halt. The program peaked with 7 new reactors in 2018. It's averaged 3 reactors a year since then and has fallen to 1 this year. And it's looking increasingly likely that this single reactor will not achieve commercial operation before the end of the year.

Do you have a source for that? Genuinely curious to read it, not trying to do that internet thing of discrediting.

You meant to write "die with prostate cancer" not "die of prostate cancer".

Prostate cancer itself has really, really low mortality - metastasis is the biggest risk from prostate tumors. Breast cancer, meanwhile, is about #4 in terms of annual deaths, about 99% of whom are female - yes, men can get breast cancer.

(Incidentally, the top three types are Lung and respiratory tract ahead by a long way, then Colo-rectal, then Stomach cancers)

Umm ... you do realise that men have a shorter lifespan than women on average right? In most countries the life expectancy difference is about 5 years.

No I didn't, and no it doesn't. A death from a metastasised cancer is still counted as a death caused by the originating tumour. My brother died of melanoma, even though the one of the hundreds of tumours he had resuting from metastisis that finally killed him was likely in his brain.

You are trying to spin a narrative and it's just not working. Employment at Sellafield does not pose health or elevated cancer risks for workers, no matter how much you try and suggest the statistics are flawed, even those who have to access high radiation areas. Airline crew, and frequent flyers, are exposed to elevated levels of radiation over their lifetimes. They might have a slightly increased risk of cancers, but if so, it's only slight.

The Guardian are trying to whip up a storm over a spilt teacup. No one has died, nor are any likely to. Sellafield makes for a great whipping boy for anyone with an abject fear of things nuclear.

Have you ever wondered at the irony of an energy infrastructure forum where near everyone has an abject fear and hatred of of all things nuclear when all forms of energy we use are the direct product of nuclear energy, even geothermal ?

Ffs, why would Ireland build an EPR? It's an abandoned design - nobody else in the world - even the French - are planning to build more of them. EDF are begging for government money to redesign it because it's proven to be a complete disaster.

E.g. Olkiluoto 3 - took 18 years to build instead of the promised 5 and ran 3 times over budget. Since they've had a SCRAM (emergency shutdown) January 2022 taking it offline for a month, in May of the same year steam turbine lining failed - offline for 3 months - then in October that year, feed water pump failures, offline again, after that more serious pump faults offline again in Jan 2023 to replace parts. Flamanville - 5 times over budget and 10 years (and counting) late. Even the chinese couldn't hide major issues found with the EPRs Taishan 1 and 2 also plagued with faults - including a 13 month shutdown of unit 1.

So every one of the 4 EPRs have been wildly over-budget, wildly over schedule and plagued with faults since starting operations (of the 3 that started). And the owner of the design has abandoned any plans to build more of them... but yeah Ireland should build one 🤔

Plenty of reading material on the topic.

As regards papers, the US National Institute of Health re-published part of a larger paper on the topic, which found that during the 21st century, wind mills have eclipsed even White Nose Syndrome as a mass-killer of bats.

Multiple mortality events in bats: a global review - PMC (nih.gov)

As to precise numbers, I don't have them to hand but I had seen North American estimates indicating many hundreds of thousands of bats were killed in all every year by wind mills.

"Bat species regularly fly to high altitudes on all continents where they occur, and many of these bats are confirmed or suspected of feeding on migratory insects."

You would be wrong in a belief that bats constarin themselves to altitudes below the bottom of turbine blade tips.

In Mexico they regularly fly 3km up.

More complete nonsense about bats being affected by wind turbines:

So even if they are not being hit and killed directly by blade collisions, their food source habitat is effectively reduced which would decrease their numbers in a less objectionable way.

Until recently I owned a house which some stupid civil servant included in a SAC, which transformed it from being my house into a state-controlled bat breeding ground, preventing me in strict legal terms from disturbing them by doing anything to the house. Yet you can chuck up a wind farm with nary a care for their effect on bats.

Governments and the civil servants who 'yes minister' them, really are two-faced bleeps.

Heysham. My god, a nuclear dunkelflaute, it's shut down for maintainance, you just can't rely on these things. A shinig example of nuclear unreliability; except with your usual disingenuity, it's the total opposite. Those reactors have been in operation for over 30 years. You picked a bad example for claimed unreliability as one of the Heysham units in 2016 set a world record of over 894 days of continuous operation and output.

You constanatly pick examples, like France, of 30+ year old reactors needing maintainance and declare them all to be unreliable, always ignoring the preceeding 30 years. It's facetious reasoning. Your neighbour shouldn't buy a new VW because you saw a 30 year old one up on hoist in a workshop.

You want real unreliability, well that's renewables. Ireland's wind capacity factor is currently 5.1% And it's more or less been like that for most of last wekk or more.

You'r anti-nuclear crusade seems to have lost sight of the bigger picture, which I thought was CO2 output. Those ancient unreliable nuclear reactors in your poster child for nuclear problems, France, are as of this moment, producing 69% of their total energy. Meanwhile here, that ultra unreliable wind is producing 14%. French CO2 output is 38g per KWh while ours are 251g.