Dangers of nuclear power are real

IN his opinion piece ‘World takes the nuclear options while we turn our faces to the wind’, Matt Cooper says I have ‘conditioned’ the Irish people to the dangers of nuclear power (March 28).

My first anti-nuclear experience was when I heard my brother and his pregnant wife had to flee from their home in Pennsylvania when Three Mile Island nuclear power station had a serious breakdown. Then, in 1976, I caught the nuclear allergy bug more seriously at Carnsore, Co Wexford, when so-called ‘experts’ warned that unless Ireland went nuclear, we would be cast back into the darkness of the Middle Ages.

My most direct anti-nuclear experience was after 1986, when I walked around abandoned towns and villages of the Chernobyl-affected areas of Belarus, northern Ukraine and western Russia, watching my Geiger counter go wild with readings of intense radioactive contamination. I knew I’d never wish this technology for anyone, not in a million years. And that’s what radioactive poison does — it lasts forever.