Russia capable of building Akkuyu plant without partners: Minister

MOSCOW – Reuters

Russia’s state-run company Rosatom will solely complete Turkey’s Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) project even if it is unable to attract local investor partners, Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak has said.

“Already, $3 billion have been invested... If they won’t find an investor, it means that the plant will be built by Akkuyu Nuclear,” he told reporters in Moscow on April 6.

Talks with potential Turkish investors for Akkuyu NPP are ongoing, Novak said.

“Our priority is Turkish companies, especially the companies in which the [Turkish] government has some stakes. I hope that an agreement will be made soon for investors to participate in the project,” he added.

The intergovernmental agreement for Turkey’s first nuclear plant was signed with Russia in 2010.

Based on the intergovernmental agreement, a provision has been included for the sale of a potential 49 percent share in the plant to foreign investors.

The 49 percent stake sale is expected to be completed in 2019, Rosatom’s head Alexey Likhachev said on March 28.

The stake was originally planned to be divided between a Turkish consortium of three contracting conglomerates under the name Cengiz-Kolin-Kalyon (CKK). But Kolin and Kalyon recently decided to pull out of the project, citing failure to agree on commercial terms.

The plant, comprising four units and with a total capacity of 4,800 megawatts, has an operational date set for the first reactor by 2023.

Turkey’s TAEK atomic energy authority on April 2 granted Rosatom a construction license to start work on the first unit of the nuclear power plant.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin jointly laid the foundation for the plant on the Mediterranean coast via a video teleconference held in Ankara on April 3.