There have been calls for Ireland to construct nuclear power plants as a clean addition to our energy production.

However, many are concerned, given disasters caused by nuclear power plants in other countries, that they're unsafe.

William Reville, Emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC, told Newstalk Breakfast that nuclear power can be both stable and safe and should be recruited to supplement wind and solar power and eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

"It's essential that we reduce and eliminate in time, and in the shortest time, the emissions of carbon to the atmosphere."

"The unfortunate thing is that at the moment the sum of wind power and solar power still falls short at times of supplying all the power that we need", said Professor Reville.

"There is a sort of hope that we will be able to develop technology that can store excess power generated by these two technologies ... but that technology isn't there yet."

According to him, nuclear energy is the perfect alternative as it is "a well-developed technology that is now safe to use and very flexible". 

Safety

There are concerns that constructing nuclear power plants on the island would put Irish people at risk of harm through explosions or disasters such as that which was seen in Chernobyl.

However, Prof Reville assures that this is not how plants would look in Ireland now.

"Nuclear power is the safest of all of the technologies for generating electricity and the history of it proves that there have been some accidents, but they've been exaggerated as to the extent of the ill effects they caused."

"There's a new generation of power plants in in production are just about to go into production now", he said.

"These are small nuclear power plants, called small modular reactors, and for example, they cannot explode. So you can't get a Chernobyl like accident in these smaller reactors cannot explode."

Listen back to the full conversation here.