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Dutch MPs have approved a government plan to spend 12 million Pounds
evaluating the safety of nuclear power and the disposal of nuclear waste.
Most of the money will be spent on assessing the safety of the country’s
two nuclear reactors, a pressurised water reactor at Borssele and a boiling
water reactor at Dodewaard.

Without the nuclear plants, Dutch emissions of carbon dioxide would
be 9 per cent higher, says Koos Andriessen, the minister for economic affairs.
The Dutch are highly sensitive to the threat of rising sea levels because
of global warming.

The Dutch government has called for a freeze of today’s emissions of
carbon dioxide by 2000 and for a cut of 20 per cent by 2005. Though the
Netherlands hopes to achieve most of these reductions by switching to less
polluting and renewable forms of energy, Andriessen has said that ‘It is
hard to imagine how we could get by in the next century without nuclear
power.’ Andriessen’s opponents fear that the study may lay the foundations
for building more nuclear power plants.