The Netherlands will not be able to meet its clean air targets without reintroducing nuclear power, Klaas Dijkhoff, leader of the right-wing VVD in parliament, told current affairs show Nieuwsuur on Monday night.

Nuclear energy offers the best way of meeting the targets set down in the Paris agreement, Dijkhoff said, adding that it is relatively clean and does not produce CO2.

‘I do not see how you can reach the targets without nuclear power,’ he said. ‘So as far as I am concerned, we can start building straight away… I hope we can look at it rationally, and not on the basis of ideas from the 1980s which have been overtaken.’

The Liberal democratic party D66 and ChristenUnie, two of the other partners in the current coalition government, said they did not back the idea.

‘I will look at every proposal seriously because dogma does not help the climate,’ said D66’s new leader Rob Jetten. ‘But I am convinced there are much wiser choices to be made than nuclear energy.’

Not an option

Dijkhoff is not the first prominent VVD member to put forward the case for nuclear power. In September, party stalwart Hans Wiegel made a similar claim and repeated it in a column in the Telegraaf this weekend.

The Netherlands has one nuclear power station, at Borssele in Zeeland. It came on stream in 1973 and is scheduled for closure in 2033. The other Dutch nuclear power station was closed in 1997.