Dec 2019: Letter to the European Commission

Za Zemiata together with lawyer Albena Belyanova wrote a letter on Belene which was sent to four EC Commissioners in Dec 2019 - the Commissioner for Energy (Kadri Simson), for the Internal Market (Thierry Breton), for the Environment (Virginius Sinkevicius) and the Executive Vice-President of the Commission, Margrethe Vesgater, who is in charge of competition. The letter points to various alleged violations of EU competition rules relating to the Belene nuclear power plant, in detail:
  • Breach of the independence of the Nuclear Regulator
  • Estimated seismic risk at Belene site
  • Compliance with national and European environmental legislation
  • Compliance with national and European legislation when announcing and conducting the procedure for selecting a strategic investor
  • Compliance with European legislation regarding the right of public participation in the decision-making process

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NPP Belene: What's new?

New timetable for Belene: 2035 start of operation, 2040: 60% from Bulgarian electricy should be produced by nuclear energy (now 30%) - “double the trouble”...
In 2020, the search for the strategic investor started and was prolonged due to the COVID crisis at least until June 2020.
In June, the three companies Rosatom, Framatome and General Electric have signed a memorandum of understanding, which is not binding. According to the memorandum, Framatom and General Electric will sell their products to Rosatom if the Russian company is selected as a strategic investor.

NPP Belene: Restart of the project and status of EIA?

The Belene NPP project in Bulgaria was started in 1970, construction started in 1987, was stopped in 1990 and restarted in 2002. An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was conducted and finished in 2004, two reactors were allowed to be built in 2005. But in 2012 the project was stopped again. On 27 June 27 2018, the Bulgarian Government cancelled its decision from 2012 to stop the Belene NPP project.
The EIA decision from 2004 should no longer be valid due to Bulgarian law which defines that the project implementation has to start in the first five years. Bulgarian Government argues that some buildings have been erected, therefore the EIA decision is still valid - but these were non-nuclear buildings (information centre and mensa).
The Austrian Ministry of Sustainability and Tourism (now Ministry for Climate Action) was asked to ask for official information from Bulgaria and to call for a new transboundary EIA if the project should proceed. The response from BMNT can be read here.

Anti Belene NGO summit 2009

From August 27 to August 29 2009 in Sofia/Svishtov the anti-Belene NGO summit took place. Many people attended, the Bulgarian media reported in detail on the event.

Read more about the Belene project and the events of the summit in the report of Belene Summit (pdf, 7mb). Pictures of the Summit you can find in the photo gallery . On this homepage you can read detailed information about the Belene summit and download the presentations of the lecturers: http://www.zazemiata.org/energy/svishtov

The Bulgarian Joint project NGOs made an exhibition on the Belene project -
the English version of the exhibition can be downloaded in our download section.

Video-reports are available here (made by the Bulgarian NGO Za Zemiata):

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Or under youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhJAyJlS5wc&feature=PlayList&p=788BCF45F10C85F2&index=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5AawYSba2w&feature=PlayList&p=788BCF45F10C85F2&index=1

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