Environment Minister Segolene Royal has said that France’s oldest nuclear power plant, scheduled for closure in 2018, could be turned into a factory producing electric cars or batteries.

During ministerial talks earlier this month, Paris and Berlin agreed to work together to decide the future of the Fessenheim site, which is near the border in north-eastern France.

In an interview with the press, Ms Royal said: “What the Germans suggested was to work on developing the land to set up a Tesla factory or a factory for making third-generation batteries.”

She told reporters that she intends to meet up with Tesla co-founder Elon Musk in the near future to try to persuade him to set up in Fessenheim.

A French-German working group will be set up to look at the various options, including creating a pilot site for dismantling power plants, for which Royal said there is a “global market”.

Fessenheim houses two 900MW reactors and has been running since 1977. France gets more than 75% of its electricity from nuclear plants, whereas Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima meltdown in Japan in 2011.