Turkey sticks to nuclear power plan

ANKARA (AFP) – Turkey is determined to build a nuclear power plant and will launch a new project to replace a failed tender, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz was quoted as saying Saturday.

“The fact that the tender was scrapped does not mean that the process is scrapped. Our determination on nuclear power plants is persisting,” Yildiz said in Kizilcahamam town, near Ankara, Anatolia news agency reported.

Energy authorities Friday cancelled a 2008 tender won by a Russian-led consortium to build Turkey's first nuclear power plant after a top administrative court suspended parts of the regulation governing the process.

Yildiz said officials were working on a new model of realizing the project through shorter procedures, adding that the involvement of the public sector might be also considered.

A consortium led by Atomstroyexport, Russia's state nuclear giant, was the only bidder in the scrapped tender to build four nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 4,800-megawatts at the Mediterranean town of Akkuyu.

The tender had been under fire since it emerged that the consortium was the sole bidder and offered above-market prices for supplying electricity to the Turkish grid.

The auction was held in September 2008, amid global financial turbulence, with Ankara rejecting requests by interested companies for a postponement.

Turkey plans to build three nuclear power plants in hopes of preventing a possible energy shortage and reducing dependence on foreign supplies but the project is fiercely opposed by environmentalists.

Ankara abandoned an earlier plan to build a nuclear plant at Akkuyu in 2000 amid a severe financial crisis and protests from environmentalists in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus.

Critics say Akkuyu is close to a seismic fault line, pointing at a powerful earthquake that killed more than 140 people in the neighboring province of Adana in 1998.

Photo: Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, seen here in May 2009. (AFP/File/Ali al-Saadi) -

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