A former spy chief was tipped as the new Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Former head of the Dutch spy agency and counter-terrorism office Dick Schoof was tipped on Tuesday to become the nation’s new Prime Minister.

The 67-year-old will lead a coalition dominated by Geert Wilders’ radical right-wing Freedom Party.

The coalition is also made up of the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, centrist New Social Contract and the Farmer-Citizen Movement.

Schoof is currently the top civil servant at the Ministry of Security and Justice.

Wilders congratulated him in a post on X, saying he “has a great track record, is non-partisan and therefore above the parites, has integrity and is also very likeable.”

Anti-Islam firebrand Wilders, who topped the polls in last year’s elections, struck a deal with the other party leaders earlier this month – capping months of negotiations that left it unclear who would become the new Dutch prime minister.

The new agreement, framed with the slogan “Hope, courage and pride”, includes plans to impose strict measures on asylum seekers, scrap family reunification for refugees and reduce the number of international students studying in the country.

At one point, the 26-page document says the government will seek to “deport people without a valid residence permit as much as possible, even forcibly”.

Wilders’s preferred candidate for prime minister withdrew last week following allegations he had been involved in medical patent fraud.

• A company demonstrated a remote-controlled robot for retrieving melted fuel debris at Japan’s destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
• The plan involves deploying an extendable pipe robot into the reactor to begin debris removal by October.
• Approximately 880 tons of highly radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain in the three damaged reactors.

The operator of Japan’s destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant demonstrated Tuesday how a remote-controlled robot would retrieve tiny bits of melted fuel debris from one of three damaged reactors later this year for the first time since the 2011 meltdown.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings plans to deploy a “telesco-style” extendable pipe robot into Fukushima Daiichi No. 2 reactor to test the removal of debris from its primary containment vessel by October.

That work is more than two years behind schedule. The removal of melted fuel was supposed to begin in late 2021 but has been plagued with delays, underscoring the difficulty of recovering from the magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami in 2011.

DRONE AIMS TO EXAMINE JAPAN’S DAMAGED FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR REACTOR FOR THE FIRST TIME

During the demonstration at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in Kobe, western Japan, where the robot has been developed, a device equipped with tongs slowly descended from the telescopic pipe to a heap of gravel and picked up a granule.

TEPCO plans to remove less than 1 ounce of debris in the test at the Fukushima plant.

“We believe the upcoming test removal of fuel debris from Unit 2 is an extremely important step to steadily carry out future decommissioning work,” said Yusuke Nakagawa, a TEPCO group manager for the fuel debris retrieval program. “It is important to proceed with the test removal safely and steadily.”

About 880 tons of highly radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain inside the three damaged reactors. Critics say the 30- to 40-year cleanup target set by the government and TEPCO for Fukushima Daiichi is overly optimistic. The damage in each reactor is different, and plans must accommodate their conditions.

Better understanding the melted fuel debris from inside the reactors is key to their decommissioning. TEPCO deployed four mini drones into the No. 1 reactor’s primary containment vessel earlier this year to capture images from the areas where robots had not reached.