SOFIA (Bulgaria), October 16 (SeeNews) – Russian nuclear engineering company Izhorskiye Zavody said it has successfully shipped the second reactor vessel for Bulgaria’s abandoned Belene nuclear power plant (NPP) project.
Izhorskiye Zavody, part of OMZ Group, had shipped the first reactor vessel to Bulgaria in February, the company said in a statement posted on its website last week.
In February, Izhorskiye Zavody said it was loading equipment, including a reactor vessel, two pressure compensators and 24 hydraulic accumulators at the seaport of Saint Petersburg, and preparing it for shipment to Bulgaria.
In December, Bulgaria’s National Electricity Company (NEK) said it paid 601.6 million euro ($638.7 million) as compensation to Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Russia's Rosatom, for the equipment manufactured by the Russian company for the Belene project, which Bulgaria had abandoned earlier.
The sum was awarded to Atomstroyexport by the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva, which earlier in 2016 ruled that NEK must pay compensation to the Russian company for ditching the project for construction of a 2,000 MW nuclear power plant in Belene, on the Danube river.
With the sum awarded to Atomstroyexport fully paid in December, NEK will now take possession of the manufactured equipment.
In 2008, Bulgaria hired Atomstroyexport to build a nuclear plant in Belene, reviving a project that had been mothballed for nearly two decades. After the project made scant headway, Sofia finally abandoned it with a parliament decision in February 2013. The government cancelled the project a year earlier due to disagreement over its estimated cost and failure to attract a strategic investor.
($ = 0.9392 euro)