Nuclear power in Europe

FRANKFURT (Dow Jones) – German utility RWE AG Wednesday said it has terminated a joint venture agreement with Bulgaria’s state-owned National Electricity Co., or NEK, due to problems with the financing of a nuclear power plant that was planned to be built near the town of Belene.

“We have terminated the joint venture agreement with NEK today because of problems financing the project,” said Stephanie Schunck, spokeswoman for RWE’s power generation unit RWE Power. (more…)

SOFIA, Nov 18 (Reuters) – French power giant GDF Suez said on Tuesday it would decide whether to share a stake in a Bulgarian nuclear project with RWE after examining a deal agreed between the German utility and Sofia.

The Bulgarian government last month chose RWE to become a strategic partner for a 49 percent stake in the planned Belene plant and gave the option to split the stake with the second-listed bidder, Belgian Electrabel, owned by GDF Suez. (more…)

Bulgaria’s sole nuclear power plant at Kozloduy on the Danube River said on November 14 that it paid back early a $52.5 million loan to Russia’s state-owned Roseximbank, which it took to upgrade its two working 1000MW reactors.

The reason for the early repayment of the loan, due in 2021, was avoiding currency risks, the plant said, as quoted by website mediapool.bg. The loan was denominated in US dollars, while its revenue was in leva and euro, the plant operator said. (more…)

Sofia. Russian company Atomstroyexport, which was picked to build Bulgaria’s nuclear power plant in the Danube town of Belene, said it has signed an annex with national power utility NEK to supply the corpus, steam generator and the turbine for the plant’s first block, as the online English edition of Dnenvik Daily reported.

The Bulgarian party was tight-lipped on the matter. (more…)

Sofia. German company RWE will from now on decide whether to grant the investment promised.
The signing of the shareholding contract for Belene nuclear power plant through which German company RWE will gain 49% of the future plant’s stakes, was postponed. Instead of end-October 2008 when the last deadline expired, the paper will most likely be endorsed in December 2008, the project’s main investor National Electricity Company (NEC) said, The Banker Weekly reported. (more…)

SOFIA, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Bulgaria urged German power utility RWE on Thursday to reject pressure from green activists and approve a deal to become a strategic investor in a planned 4.0 billion euro ($5.16 billion) nuclear power plant.

Deputy Energy Minister Yavor Kuyumdzhiev said Bulgaria will wait for RWE’s supervisory board approval of the deal until the spring of 2009, when construction of the 2,000 megawatt Belene plant should start. (more…)

Bulgaria and the strategic investor in the Belene nuclear powerplant, German RWE, would put pen to paper as soon as possible, said Mardik Papazyan, executive director of national power grid operator NEK.

The state would add 300 million leva to the operator’s capital so that it could order the equipment, which was expected to long to produce as Russian plants were overwhelmed with orders for Chinese and Turkish nuclear plants, Papazyan said. (more…)

Bulgaria’s Cabinet plans to inject 300 million leva into the National Electric Company (NEK) to cover the costs of the transitional stage of building the nuclear power plant at Belene on the Danube River, the Government press service said in a statement.

The cash would be given as an equity hike in NEK, which is now part of the Bulgarian Energy Holding (BEH) that the Cabinet created in September 2009 by integrating Maritza Iztok mines, Maritza Iztok 2 thermal power plant and NEK into the holding structure of gas provider Bulgargaz. (more…)

SOFIA, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Bulgaria is close to choosing a winner between Belgian energy firm Electrabel and Germany’s RWE AG to make a strategic investment in a planned 4 billion euro ($5.6 billion) nuclear plant, Bulgarian utility NEK said on Thursday.

In August, state-owned NEK asked RWE and Electrabel, owned by France’s GDF Suez, to improve their offers for a 49 percent stake in the plant it is building to restore Bulgaria’s position as a leading power exporter in southeastern Europe. (more…)

The groundbreaking ceremony for the official start of construction on the second Bulgarian Belene nuclear power plant is scheduled for September 3. Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev will turn the first sod, according to the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s press centre in the northern city of Pleven, as quoted by Bulgarian-language daily Dnevnik. (more…)