IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops are “totally opposed” to the redevelopment of the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, west England, and would also oppose any plans to build a nuclear reactor in Ireland, the Archbishop of Cashel Most Rev Dermot Clifford said yesterday.
He was speaking in the context of this week’s announcement by the British government that it had identified 10 sites for the next generation of nuclear power plants in the UK, including at Sellafield.
The archbishop said that while the matter had not yet been discussed by the Irish Bishops Conference, “95 per cent of the bishops are against nuclear reactors”.
He spoke of the threat of Sellafield to people in west England and on the east coast of Ireland, as evidenced in 1957 when fallout from the then-named Windscale covered substantial areas in both countries.
Rather than nuclear power the emphasis should be on developing alternative energies such as wind, wave and solar power, he said. He was speaking at Dublin’s St Francis of Assisi primary school in Belmayne, Balgriffin, where he launched The Cry of the Earth, a pastoral reflection by the Irish Bishops on climate change.
– from irishtimes.com