Professor Philip Walton:

There were a lot of questions. I am glad Deputy Griffin mentioned long-term planning, which is what we want. We are asking for long-term consideration of this point. The Deputy asked for examples of democratic countries with nuclear power. There are two very good ones in Scandinavia. Finland has had plebiscites about whether to go for nuclear energy and has decided to go ahead. It also had a plebiscite on a waste repository, which is being built at the same time. Sweden gets about 30% of its electricity from ten plants. It had a plebiscite and was considering shutting down the plants. The unions were up in arms and in the end the decision was reversed, with Sweden continuing to use nuclear power.

Deputy Colreavy spoke about SMRs and asked whether back-up would be required. This is exactly what is required for wind energy. Wind energy across Ireland can fail totally and there must be back-up, which must be costed in when considering the price of wind energy. A group of SMRs would be involved and not all of them would fail. There might be six of them, but the chances of all six failing at once would be negligible. Each one provides approximately 200 megawatts. If one fails that could easily be made up within the system.