12 Apr (NucNet): Bulgaria’s Cabinet decided in principle yesterday to construct a seventh nuclear reactor unit at the Kozloduy nuclear power plant on the Danube river, a statement confirmed.
The new 1,000-megawatt unit will be designed and built “on a market basis” without any government guarantees and without using taxpayers’ money, finance minister Simeon Dyankov said.
The plans to build a seventh unit at the plant came after the Cabinet officially decided on 28 March 2012 to abandon the project for two Russian-built 1,000-MW VVER units at Belene, a new site, saying it would be more realistic to add a reactor at Kozloduy, where two VVER-1000s are operating and four VVER-440s are being decommissioned.
According to the Bulgarian Atomic Forum long-lead components have already been ordered and manufactured for the two Belene units.
Options now include selling them to another VVER-1000 customer, storing them pending licensing of a new Kozloduy unit, or selling them and opening a completely new tender for the Kozloduy unit, the forum said.
In 1999, the Bulgarian government closed down Kozloduy nuclear power plant’s four VVER 440-230 units as a condition of entry into the EU.
Units 1 and 2 were shut down in 2002 and units 3 and 4 in 2006. Kozloduy-5 and -6 are newer VVER-1000 units and provide just over one third of the country’s electrical power production.
