I would like to have a word with the people who believe a country that cannot repair a ha-ha wall for less than €660,000, and which paid more than €300,000 for a bike shed, should now be prioritising nuclear energy. So, riddle me this, nuclear-atarians: how do you propose Ireland actually builds this infrastructure? To understand why this feels unfathomable, let’s look at what building a nuclear energy capability actually entails.Only about roughly one fifth of a nuclear programme is actually about the “nuclear” part. That involves reactor physics, figuring out the whole uranium thing – which is harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard – and radiological planning. This fifth is also the most specialist. We have precisely zero expertise in any of this, but it is also the least of our worries. It’s actually the other four fifths of a nuclear project where the trouble lies. The first thing we would struggle with is needing a teacher’s note to allow the project to exist in the first place. Given that a reactor is a nationally strategic project, even a consented reactor would need to survive the bloodbath of judicial reviews that would follow. If we could actually pass something of this scale, Galway would probably have a ring road.And it’s not just the project that needs a sign-off, because a reactor is useless without a 400kV transmission line to carry its power away, which requires transmission over land and wayleaves across several counties. If we could do that, the North–South Interconnector would be carrying electricity instead of entering its second decade of consensual non-existence. And if grid capacity was a solvable issue, we probably wouldn’t have 132 electric buses wasting away in storage, unable to be used for this very reason.Then we would somehow need to lodge this enormous piece of infrastructure far underground, with deep tunnelling that Dublin has been promising on other projects since 2001 – the current progress of which you may verify by looking out the window (any window, it doesn’t matter which one). And if you don’t like data centres, stop reading now – because this power will need bulk industrial water at a volume no municipal system in this country supplies, with the eastern and midlands project to transport water across one of the wettest countries in Europe already 20 or so years in discussion.Speaking of transporting goods, we would need the capacity to move loads weighing several hundred tonnes across the island on roads and infrastructure that would buckle under their weight if they weren’t re-engineered. Given we have not yet managed to build a marshalling port for our other much-needed power source – offshore wind – I’m not going to be holding my breath for a faster turnaround on nuclear.Now, assuming we make it this far, the hard part begins. Building a reactor means several dozens of separate contractors working on the same tiny site at the same time, in a strict order. The foundations have to be finished before the steel frame can go up; the frame has to be completed before the heavy machinery can be installed; and so on. Fans of Grand Designs will know that everything depends on everything else – meaning a two-week delay by one contractor early on can push the finish date back by a year as costs spiral.With no Kevin McCloud on hand, keeping a multibillion-euro project in sequence is a management discipline in its own right – the kind of discipline the national children’s hospital lacked as its budget tripled. And that was just one building, using ordinary construction methods, with no nuclear regulator needed to inspect every crevice. A nuclear reactor would also need certified welders, pipe-fitters and electricians in the thousands. These are the very tradespeople who would already have built our houses. If we could find them. It goes without saying that someone – a regulator – would need to supervise all of the consultant engineers. But our most recent attempt at creating a regulator was the maritime authority, promised for early 2023 to unlock offshore wind. Of course, it arrived months late and is itself a factor in the bottleneck for creating wind power. Now try to do every part of this process across five governments and, oh, let’s say 25 budget cycles.The truth is that if we were actually able to build nuclear energy, we wouldn’t need nuclear energy, because we’d have built everything else that we needed first. We’d have metros, ring roads, transmission lines, water supply, houses, shipping ports, tradespeople, the grid and a State capable of delivering infrastructure. A great nuclear reactor? Please, we are debating a nuclear distracter – something that absorbs Ireland’s energy instead of generating any.