Ireland almost went nuclear in the race for atomic power
Stormont was ready to build a nuclear reactor on the shores of Lough Neagh, only for the idea to be finally shelved
Almost seven decades ago, Ireland’s first nuclear power plant came far closer to being built than most people realise. It would have been 20km from the Border and planning was advanced — but the determination of one unseen figure, plus a nuclear disaster at a critical moment, thwarted the proposal.
Previously secret files declassified at the Public Record Office in Belfast reveal how, in the years after World War II, the old Stormont government had agreed in principle to building an atomic power station. The only question was timing and location.
In fact, Stormont was considering something closer to Sellafield — an “atomic factory” to enable the ultrasensitive processing of radioactive material.
In March 1955, finance minister Brian Maginness and Lord Glentoran, the commerce minister, discussed the project. Glentoran’s officials believed “the benefits to be derived were so tremendous that the inherent risks were worth taking”.
Glentoran believed Britain’s nuclear engineering would soon be a “most valuable form of export” and “he would like to think that Northern Ireland would have one of the first of the new stations, if not the first”.
He didn’t even want to wait until results from the UK’s first gas-cooled graphite-moderated stations were known. That might mean a station wouldn’t be operational until 1965 and he wanted it running by 1963.
The costs were astronomical. Officials calculated that just building the station would require more than a third of Stormont’s income.
After much discussion, it was decided that the plant was to be situated at Washing Bay on the southern shores of Lough Neagh.
In December 1956, the deputy director and chief civil engineer of the UK Atomic Energy Authority visited Northern Ireland for three days “to explore the possibilities of obtaining sites for atomic factories”.
A record said they “particularly requested that the visit should be kept quiet, as they did not want any publicity”.
They wanted remote sites “several hundred acres in extent, adjacent to a plentiful supply of cooling water and a good supply of fresh water” — 3.4 billion litres of water a day, unless it had cooling towers.
The memo said: “They have in mind a site for a diffusion plant plus a reactor, or a general purposes site which could also include a chemical separation plant.”
The diffusion plant, it said, might cost £100m (€2.5bn today).
It added that sites in Britain “are even more difficult to obtain”, which increased Northern Ireland’s appeal.
By February 1957, a secret memo stated that the UK’s Reactor Location Panel had approved the proposal.
Days later, Glentoran told cabinet that a single nuclear station generating 150MW was “practicable”. He said two possible sites on the southwest shores of Lough Neagh had been approved on safety and public health grounds.
He requested authorisation to build the plant by 1963-64, saying he’d been informed by London that there would be no difficulties if a decision was taken then, but there may be problems if they delayed.
He warned that financing such a project might come “at the expense of other developments”. This unnerved other ministers who baulked at what it would mean for their budgets.
Yet it wasn’t just money at stake. Some ministers feared the Republic might build a nuclear plant first. Education minister Harry Midgley told cabinet that a delay “might permit the revival of the Éire proposal for a combined station for North and South”.
After reassurances that the money might come from elsewhere, Glentoran got approval.
But within months, problems emerged. A Whitehall official warned that in Britain their experience was that “effluent problems frequently turn out greater than were envisaged by their designers at the planning stage”.
An expert’s report said the radioactive cooling air from the two reactors would be “not filtered” but “exhausted to the atmosphere”. He said there would be “constant leaks” of the car
British PM Anthony Eden said: ‘Rivers across the Irish Border flow from south to north, so the possibility of any objections from Éire seem rather remote’
bon dioxide used to cool the reactors, and then all the gas would be deliberately discharged periodically. He listed 13 ways in which radiation would or could be released, but he believed Lough Neagh’s water would remain safe.
On October 9, 1957, ministers were told there was “no possibility whatever of an explosion of the reactor, and theoretically none of its even going on fire”.
But the day after that was written, the Windscale fire created Britain’s worst nuclear disaster (it was regarded as the world’s worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979).
By the time ministers met, a few days later, Terence O’Neill, a future Stormont PM, suggested delaying an announcement due to the accident.
Health minister Jack Andrews feared the implications for drinking water and ultimately ministers didn’t approve the plan, asking for more work on alternative sites and examination of the risks.
While Stormont was stalling, an influential opponent was undermining the plan elsewhere. Sir Ernest Rock Carling, a pioneering London doctor, visited British PM Anthony Eden in December 1956 (coincidentally the day before the IRA border campaign began).
An expert consultant to the British government on radiation, he had been attending sensitive meetings of the western powers and told Eden that “a number of them were most apprehensive about the siting of reactors by neighbouring countries close to the frontiers”.
The minutes record that he “thought of the possibility of objections from Éire if the proposed reactor for Northern Ireland were sited too near the Border... he explained that the dangers from reactors fall into two main categories — the risk of accidents (such as explosion), and the risk from the discharge of radioactive effluents and waste, which may be either gaseous, liquid or solid”.
He talked up the risk of polluting waterways, but Eden was sceptical, telling him that “rivers across the Border flowed from south to north, so that the possibility of any objections from Éire seemed rather remote”.
Carling said this was only part of the difficulty. The liquid being released would mean opposition from those drinking the water. He warned that with more powerful reactors, “an accident, if it were to occur, would probably be much more dangerous”.
More than a year later, in April 1958, Carling wrote privately to Stormont’s health minister, saying he couldn’t be sure Lough Neagh’s water would be safe to drink. He said none of the experts that he had consulted liked the site.
The following month, experimental physicist Karl George Emeleus of Queen’s University Belfast told Stormont he was happy about the plant’s safety. However, he said: “On the one hand all known and stated objections to the Lough Neagh site appear to have been met: on the other hand, at least one man who is at the centre of things in England (Sir Ernest) does not like it.”
A senior Stormont official said that Carling had “on his own initiative seen the PM about the site”, that he was “still unhappy about it” and that despite asking Emeleus to persuade him, he’d remained opposed.
Three months later the project would be sunk from London. In a confidential letter to Northern Ireland PM Basil Brooke, the UK Atomic Energy Authority said “the situation has been materially changed” due to plans to increase the use of Lough Neagh for drinking water — and “this has made us considerably less happy about the choice of Lough Neagh for a nuclear power station site”.
Unknown to the public, Carling had fatally undermined Stormont’s plan, and in so doing kept the island of Ireland nuclear-free.