Turkey's main opposition party expressed support for environmentally friendly and secure nuclear technology yesterday.

At a press conference in Parliament yesterday, Öztürk Yılmaz, the Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy chairman and a lawmaker from the eastern Ardahan province, said: "We support a variety of energy, we also give support to nuclear energy, if it is environmentally friendly, environmentalist and secure."

Yılmaz added that Turkey should primarily produce energy using local resources. "We are surely against technology that is unsafe and disrespectful to the environment, but we can't be against technology" in general, he said.

Yılmaz's remarks came after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) on Tuesday.

The Akkuyu project started with a 2010 intergovernmental agreement between Ankara and Moscow.

The plant, which will have four reactors each with a capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW), is being built by the Rosatom Russian State Nuclear Energy Corporation.

At full capacity it will produce 35 billion kilowatts (kW) of electricity by 2026, which will meet about 10 percent of Turkey's electricity needs.

At present, worldwide there are 450 nuclear power plants in 31 countries and 55 plants are under construction.