Cost overruns, delays, lack of coordination, diffused responsibilities and poor priority setting are among a list of defects in nuclear decommissioning programs in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovakia identified in a resolution passed by a European Parliament committee.

Russian reactor builder AtomStroyExport (ASE) has increased its claim against Bulgaria's National Electricity Company to €1.0 billion ($1.3 billion) following the Bulgarian government's decision to scrap the Belene plant project.

Westinghouse is to study the feasibility of a seventh unit at Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant, focusing on a hybrid reactor design incorporating VVER equipment as one of two possible options.

 

The potential extension of the lives of the two operating reactors at Bulgaria's Kozloduy plant by up to 20 years will be examined by a consortium between Russia's Rosenergoatom and France's EDF under a recently signed contract.

The process to build a new reactor at Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant has started with an agreement in principle to go ahead with the project from the country's cabinet. The move comes two weeks after the government scrapped plans for a new plant at Belene.

Bulgaria will not go ahead with the completion of a new nuclear power plant at Belene and instead wants the Russian-supplied reactor that was to have been installed there to become the seventh unit at the existing Kozloduy site.

While the deadline for the signing of the project agreement for Bulgaria's planned Belene nuclear power plant approaches, the government continues to seek partners to help finance the project. Russia's AtomStroyExport warned that it will stop work on the project unless the agreement is signed.

The European Court of Auditors has called for a more "effective, efficient and economical" use of financial contributions from the European Union (EU) towards the decommissioning of power reactors in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovakia.

Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant has notified the country's Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRA) about its plans to increase the generating capacity of units 5 and 6 by a combined 120 MWe (gross), Bloomberg reported. The uprate would require a licensing change, according to NRA's president, Sergei Tsochev. He said that the agency would be able to issue a new licence to the plant by the end of 2013, provided that it was supplied with all the necessary documents in time. Tsochev noted that the Kozloduy plant will also need to seek approval to extend the operating lives of the two Russian-supplied VVER-1000 units four years before their current licences are due to expire, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In June 2011, Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borissov said that the country will seek to extend the reactors' operation by ten years. "To allow a service life extension, we need to examine the aging of the reactors and to have part of the equipment replaced," Tsochev said.