NEXT year Ireland will start to pay the full price for a decision made back in 1981, when the Carnsore nuclear power project was consigned to the waste bin. Instead of coughing up about €140m for annual greenhouse gas credits, Ireland could, along with the likes of France, now be enjoying a low-emission energy industry, one that does not spill out tonnes of noxious gases that threaten the very existence of future generations.

But as one expert pointed out this week, this is Ireland and we do things differently here. Instead of simply forgetting the nuclear issue, it was set in stone back in 1999 when the Government made the bizarre decision to incorporate a ban on future nuclear projects in the 1999 Generation Act.

The country is now at least opening up to the idea of a debate on nuclear power and what it has to offer as an alternative to the fossil fuels which currently provide most of our energy. The debate is slowly gathering pace, with celebrities like Eddie Hobbs lending their voices to those looking to open minds to the possibility that we might some day have a nuclear Ireland. Even the Green Minister for Energy, Eamon Ryan, earlier this year called for a debate on the possible role of nuclear energy in Ireland.

Approved

It has been a long time coming, but as David Manning of IBEC says, it is one we need to get going if we are to have any chance of dealing with issues such as carbon emissions.

The debate has been fuelled by an upswing in the nuclear industry worldwide, most notably in the US, where the number of plants is set to soar. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive 12 applications to build new nuclear-power reactors this year, with another 15 being prepared for 2008. Incredibly, these will be the first applications since Three Mile Island suffered a near meltdown in 1979.

It is not that there have been no new plants in the intervening period, but simply that the industry was suffering a malaise induced by poor regulation and poor technological performance.

Plants that had been approved in the mid-1970s took over 20 years to build, with costs soaring our of control and rubbishing the notion that nuclear energy could be cheap. Instead of costing hundreds of millions to build, costs soared to billions. Even Shoreham in upstate New York, a plant which never actually fired up because of local opposition, had cost $6bn by the time the lights were finally extinguished on the abortive project. It is not an industry to enter lightly and hence the need for a serious debate.

Ireland had one before, of course, culminating in the decision to abort plans for a plant at Carnsore in Co Wexford. Indeed by the late 1970s, the ESB had big plans for up to four reactors, which were supposed to generate all and more of its electricity needs. The ESB eventually came up with a proposal for a £350m, 650 MW reactor at Carnsore Point, Co Wexford, in 1968. The plan was to become independent of foreign oil. It ended in tears, however, as the ESB was publicly ridiculed for planning 3,000 MW of power when total consumption ran to just 2,540 MW.

The Generation Act of 1999 and its ban on nuclear projects was invoked by an energy expert this week as evidence of our craziness when it comes to all matters pertaining to nuclear energy. "The irony of course is that it was meant as a sop to the Greens, just after we had signed up to insanely ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions.

"It was as if someone in the ESB needed legislative protection for Moneypoint, the power plant which everyone in the industry agrees would -- or at least should -- be the first casualty of an Irish nuclear age," the energy expert said.

The campaign for a nuclear Ireland is one of the aims behind an organisation called BENE, (a Better Environment with Nuclear Energy) which is a loose group of professionals gathered together with the aim of at least getting a debate on the matter under way.

One of its members, Frank Turvey, will put forward the case for nuclear power in Ireland's energy mix and he is in no doubt that its absence is already costing us. Mr Turvey had worked in the nuclear industry overseas before coming home to Ireland back in 1968 to work on what would become the Carnsore project. "We chose one of the best sites in Europe," he said.

Dumped

Mr Turvey points out that, out of the global population, some two thirds enjoy the benefits of nuclear power. His group is hoping to influence public opinion in favour of going nuclear and as he explains, the case for going nuclear is becoming emphatic. "Our economy is under threat because of the situation with energy supply, with 90pc of our energy needs imported and both domestic and industrial users now paying above average for their electricity. It used to be about 5pc below."

Peak oil has already arrived and next year we will have to start paying for greenhouse gases, Mr Turvey said. The nuclear expert, who stayed on in Ireland after the Carnsore project had been dumped, points out that we will have to stomp up about €140m annually in greenhouse gas fees, a situation which would never have arisen if we had proceeded with the Carnsore project.

That however is in the past. He is now concerned that if we are to embrace the nuclear age, time is of the essence. "If we dither much longer we will find ourselves at the end of a very long queue, these things are not simple to build," he said. All things going well however, he believes Ireland could have its own plant up and running by 2017.

A report published by State agency Forfas last year sought to look at the issue of Ireland's over-dependence on oil as an energy source and among the recommendations was one suggesting we at least look at the possibility of going nuclear. The report, titled A Baseline Assessment of Ireland's Oil Dependence, said that although not economically feasible in the short to medium term, Ireland should consider the possibility of developing nuclear energy as a more long-term solution. The report did point to potential pitfalls, including those previously highlighted by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) which had come to the conclusion that due to the large size of nuclear plants and the small size of the Irish electricity system, a nuclear facility would require so much back-up conventional plant as to substantially raise its overall costs, reducing any potential attraction for investors.

Generation

The ESRI also said that the economically feasible scale of a nuclear power station would exceed the capacity of the Irish market to absorb its output. "Therefore, Ireland is currently not an attractive location for building a nuclear power station," the ESRI advised.

But other experts disagree and things would seem to have moved on since then, certainly enough to have Forfas conclude that a debate should get underway. The basic point being made by Forfas was that in order to lessen our dependence on hydrocarbons, other means of generating electricity had to be considered. "Another option for Ireland to secure its long-term energy security, especially in relation to electricity generation, will be to consider developing the use of nuclear energy.

"Although this is explicitly not part of Ireland's policy preferences at present, the revived interest in redeveloping a nuclear electricity sector in the UK will provide an important context of Ireland's electricity options in the next five to 15 years," it concluded.

Since the ESRI outlined its objections there have been some important developments, including the arrival of smaller scale nuclear power plants and moves to increase the interconnection of the national electricity grid. Forfas itself had suggested that if such smaller-scale power stations were to come on stream and Ireland's level of interconnection with the UK market was significantly increased, nuclear energy could become a more realistic energy option for Ireland.

Fintan Slye of Eirgrid explains that recent developments in nuclear technology mean that we are no longer looking at an industry that can only deliver massive 2,000 MW power plants. This is critical if Ireland is to make a move in the direction of nuclear power, as any such plant would simply dwarf all others and leave the grid exposed to outages on a massive scale. Such a plant would account for 40pc of the electricity generated here and, from a security point of view, that would be unacceptable. However, there are several plants on the grid in the 450 MW range and new technology means that nuclear plants are now being constructed with capacities barely above this level -- 600MW plants are now commonplace in the nuclear industry.

Performance

On top of this Eirgrid is advancing with plans to boost the level of interconnection with the UK and ultimately the European electricity grid. This will lift the amount of interconnection to the 800MW mark, a level which would allow the grid to accommodate a 600MW nuclear plant safe in the knowledge that if there were an outage, enough power could be imported to cover for the shortfall. The increased level of interconnection also raised the prospect of surplus power generated by a nuclear plant being exported.

But as well as becoming smaller -- and this is key to public confidence in the industry -- nuclear power plants are becoming more reliable, with availability now running at levels of more than 90pc and in some cases 100pc. This type of performance contrasts with that of nuclear plant 30 years ago, when many plants were out of commission for up to 50pc of the time.

One of the most persuasive arguments in favour of nuclear is the green agenda. While the environmental lobby has been the vanguard of the anti-nuclear lobby, it has consistently overlooked the industry's capacity to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But if Ireland is to stand any chance of meeting its commitments to reduce carbon emissions we need to look at alternatives to fossil fuels, including nuclear power. Targets set in the late 1990s are already well out of reach -- in 1997, Ireland agreed to limit emissions of CO2 to 60.1 million tonnes by 2012 but it is already producing around 70 million tonnes a year.

Alternatives to oil and gas include green-generation technologies, such as wind or wave turbines, tidal power plants and solar technology. Unfortunately with the possible exception of tidal power all of these can prove less than reliant. For a constant source of clean power, the only realistic option appears to be nuclear.

The public is beginning to accept this and recent surveys show that in America at least, the number of consumers supporting nuclear energy has doubled in the past three years.

The industry is also a lot safer today that 30 years ago. One of the reasons for this is the development of pebble bed reactors (PBR). This technology claims a dramatically higher level of safety and has achieved higher thermal efficiencies than traditional nuclear plant. Instead of water, it uses an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.

Security

The technology was first developed in Germany as far back as the 1950s but was only advanced in recent years with plants now being built in the US, South Africa, Europe and China. It means that the chances of a meltdown or other over-heating and resultant radioactive emissions are dramatically reduced -- although conventional power plants would appear to have conquered these problems since the disaster at Chernobyl and the near disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The other great factor in favour of going nuclear is the security of supply. Right now all of our oil is imported, most of it from unstable regions of the globe. The ongoing tensions in the Middle East do little for confidence in oil as a raw material on which to build your energy industry. Nuclear power has no such problems, with the biggest resources of uranium (the raw material for nuclear plants) located in Canada and Australia, two of the safest countries on the planet. But even if this were not the case, Ireland could have its own uranium resource. Back in the 1970s the country briefly became the focus for a uranium exploration project, supported by money from the EEC. It met with some success before public opinion intervened and this project too was consigned to history.