I heartily applaud Ireland's efforts towards "green energy." I remember when "solar energy' was on the fast track in the late '70's to the point it was being said that it would be available and affordable to a large percentage of the population by the mid-80's or so. And, then, it suddenly disappeared from the marquee. I always wondered about this until someone mentioned in a discussion circa 1990 that what happened was Exxon bought out 51% of the worldwide solar interests...so, no solar till we get all the oil. I've never been ever to validate this bit of info. But it wouldn't surprise me since it wouldn't be anything new in the corporate world. However, when Mercedes-Benz bought Chrysler it came out, factually, that the owner of no less than 43% of Chrysler stock was none other than...the Kuwaiti government! So much for energy-efficient automobiles. The whole oil racket is such a tangled web of power and ownership.
Anyway, the main problem with nuclear energy is not just the low grade radiation seepage. The two largest problems are the threat of a major accident (and, now, add attack to the equation) at many of these increasingly antiquated and ill-supervised plants; and, then, of course the spent full storage, now mostly in onsite containment that's even more vulnerable to sabotogue or accident than the plants themselves. Yucca Mountain isn't the easy solution here, folks. The answer?...I really don't think anyone has one yet. The old story of a rush to a new technology without plans for its safety or waste ramifications.
But I've been through this over and over, it seems, first with the No-Nukes in the 70's (Three Mile Island woke me up...I was at the No-Nukes Concert in lower Manhattan, '79, with 500,000 people, biggest outdoor jam since Woodstock), and, now, with the Unplug Salem Campaign here in South Jersey since '95. The three Salem (2) and Hope Creek (1) reactors on the Jersey side of the Delaware Bay just below Wilmington, DE, are the oldest and most problem-prone reactors, and with the worst safety record, of any in the country. They've been shut-down for infractions by the NRC numerous times, and yet they keep restarting them. AND they are the only reactors allowed to circumvent the Clean Water Act and operate without cooling towers, thus using Delaware Bay water which they suck in through intake pipes that kill an estimated 3 billion fish per year. The trade-off for this was a Wetlands Mitigation plan that has turned into a fiasco of nil value, and also caused the spraying of thousands of acres of wetlands with Roundup to kill phragmites, an arguably detrimental plant intruder, and the defoliant has completely devastated all the vegetation in these areas leaving acres of seared brown holes in the marsh oozing with thousands of gallons of herbicide.
And, speaking of "Jersey barriers," if there is a major accident at either Salem/Hope Creek or Oyster Creek just above Atlantic City, on any kind of west wind (or any wind in Oyster Creeks' case), there is no vehicular escape route out of the South Jersey peninsula, and especially Cape May County, that doesn't head directly into the radiation plume (we're within the 50 mile catastrophic area and there is no bridge across the Delaware River or Bay below the Delaware Memorial Bridge near Wilmington). The only way out is by plane or boat...so, if you don't have a plane or boat...
Anyway, I present this mostly factual rumination (except for that Exxon/Solar energy deal...if anybody can either verify or discredit that I'd appreciate it) for perusal; and you can decide for yourselves. I will say that if they ever offer a provably SAFE and ENVIRONMENTALLY SOUND way of producing nuclear power, I probably wouldn't have a problem with that.
There's now over 1,300 hits to the Unplug Salem on Google it's grown so rapidly, but here's site links that sum up the gist of it, for those who might be interested. It's really more about common sense at this point, there's even pro-Nuclear people who would like to see these old and dangerous plants shut down. You wouldn't drive your family around in a car so old it might kill them, so why would you run old and decrepit nuclear plants?

http://www.cleanoceanaction.org/PressReleases/PR2000/PSEGawardProtest.htm

http://unplugsalem.org/airplane.htm

http://unplugsalem.org (they're revamping the site, so alot of the links aren't loading yet, scroll down to the red "Unplug Salem...McGreevey...KI..." link for a good overview)