Bulgaria offers Ukraine reactors from unfinished Belene Nuclear Power Plant
Bulgaria wants to sell Ukraine VVER-1000 nuclear reactors from the unfinished Belene nuclear power plant. On Thursday, the Bulgarian MPs instructed the Minister of Energy to start negotiations with Ukraine with 155 votes in favor, btv reports.
- Subscribe to LIGA.net in English on Twitter
The price of the deal will be subject to discussion, but it cannot be less than what Bulgaria paid – about 1.2 billion leva, (more than 600 million euros), Bulgarian MP Delyan Dobrev said on Facebook.
He noted that the Khmelnytskyi NPP has two partially constructed power units for the VVER-1000 reactor. "In this regard, Ukraine is the only buyer of our equipment in the world, and we are the only seller. This is a win-win situation for both parties," he said.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov said at a press conference during the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that negotiations had already begun.
"It is important that talks have begun on whether these reactors can be used in one of Ukraine's nuclear power plants. Of course, this is just the beginning of negotiations. There are many technical parameters – financial, economic – that need to be discussed," Denkov stated.
The European Commission said today that Ukraine can use EU money to purchase nuclear reactors from Bulgaria – there are no obstacles to this.
The Khmelnytskyi NPP is located in the town of Netishyn, Khmelnytskyi Oblast in western Ukraine. The Khmelnytskyi NPP has two VVER-1000 power units with a total capacity of 2000 MW (commissioned in 1987 and 2004).
KhNPP has two partially constructed VVER-1000 reactors. In 2017, the then director general of KhNPP Mykola Panashchenko said that there were plans to complete them using a reactor unit from the Czech company Skoda JS.
In November 2021, Energoatom signed an agreement on the construction of the fifth and sixth power units at KhNPP using American technology.
In 2006, Rosatom won an international tender for the construction of two VVER-1000 power units at the Belene NPP in Bulgaria, but the project was suspended three years later. In 2012, Bulgaria abandoned the construction of the plant altogether.
