Ireland, and particularly our east coast, has been a sitting duck since 1956, forced against our will to be party to Britain's atomic age. When the world's first industrial-scale power station was opened at Calder Hall in Sellafield, it was promoted at the time to British consumers as "electric power that would be too cheap to meter". It did not take them long to realise the falsity of that statement. The station closed last March as it was said to be increasingly uneconomic. That is good news but it will take 100 years of decommissioning before the site is declared to be safe.