Noel Dempsey (Meath, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy could multiply the figure by three or 3.5. It would amount to well over €1 billion.

Taking the environmental aspects into account as well as the economic aspects, nuclear power is not all that good. In particular, to put a sufficiently large power plant in Ireland would mean installing a plant capable of between 1200 MW or 1250 MW at a minimum. That would give rise to the same type of problem that would arise with regard to putting too much wind or other type of power on the electricity system. As a result of the size of our market, the largest plants we have would be between 400 MW and 500 MW. One or two plants would be slightly larger. One must be consistently aware of the possibility of outages on some of those and the effect this would have on supply.

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