By Elena Lalowa Dec 30, 2006, 6:29 GMT
Kosloduj, Bulgaria - The Kosloduj nuclear power stations on the river Danube will probably be shrouded in dark clouds when Bulgaria celebrates its admission to the European Union on New Year's Eve.
Two nuclear power stations there have to be shut down immediately before Bulgaria joins the bloc owing to EU security concerns.
Bulgaria will then cease to be the largest electricity exporter in the Balkans and may have to import electricity. Both employees in Kosloduj and experts in Sofia fear the likelihood of this scenario.
Disconnecting both power stations, which according to the Soviet manufacturer could take until 2010 and 2012, may have serious financial implications for the country.
'Bulgaria will lose up to 10 billion euros (13 billion dollars) because of the early closure,' says the lawyer Atanas Semow, a spokesman for the citizens' committee formed to save the plant. And the loss could be even higher, if oil prices continue to rise.
For a long time, Bulgaria has been exporting electricity to several Balkan countries thereby quenching the hunger for energy in those nations. Apart from neighbouring Greece, they include Serbia together with Kosovo and Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.
'Two years ago, the two blocks saved the Olympic Games in Greece,' Semow claims. His committee has vainly collected 518,000 signatures for a referendum on Kosloduj.
The scheduled outage of the two 440 megawatt power stations has prompted fears of electricity shortages in the region.
'Panic in the Balkans,' read the headline of the large Bulgarian daily 24 Tschassa. In Bulgaria itself, the declining exports would lead to notably higher electricity costs.
Kosloduj,which will only operate two 1,000 megawatt blocks from next year, has already announced an 18 per cent increase of its electricity prices.
Commenting on the agreement with the EU, the director, Ivan Genov, said, 'We will shut down two absolutely safe power plants.'
The retrofitting by Russian and German companies had given the controversial power stations 'EU safety standards for operating,' Genov stressed.
The closure had been for 'purely political' reasons. 'The type WWER-440 power stations had nothing in common with the blocks in Chernobyl where the worst case scenario had occurred in 1986,' assured the technical director Rascho Parvanov, referring to the reactor explosion catastrophe.
Although EU experts had examined the retrofitted power stations in 2003 and approved them, the Bulgarian government did not want to broach the subject of energy again following accession negotiations with Brussels as membership envisioned for 2007 was at stake.
Nowadays, many Bulgarians speak of the 'political price' their country had to pay for joining the EU. Membership has come despite the fact that the reactor built in the early 1970s is akin to a 'Lada car with a BMW engine,' wrote a Bulgarian newspaper in reference to German modernisation of the Soviet nuclear power station.
Your Talkback on this Story