Belene nuclear power plant
On 5 June 2007, World Environment Day, environmental organizations in 14 countries protested against the plans for BNP Paribas to fund the construction of the Belene nuclear power plant in Bulgaria, one of Europe’s most dangerous nuclear power plants.
BNP Paribas plans to finance nuclear power plant in earthquake-prone zone
activists protest in 14 european countries
Friends of the Earth groups were active at protests in cities including Amsterdam, Brussels & Vienna.
The Belene Project is situated in an earthquake-prone area in Northern Bulgaria, close to the Romanian border. During the last large earthquake in 1977, 120 people died just 14 km from the project site. The plan to build a nuclear power plant here goes back to Soviet times.
Belene was conceived in the early 1980s and construction began in 1985, shortly before the Chernobyl disaster took place.
Popular protests and a study by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences warning against the siting of nuclear reactors in this area led to a halt in construction. In the 1990s the project was officially scrapped when the Bulgarian Cabinet deemed Belene to be “technically unsafe and economically not viable”.
But in 2004 the Bulgarian Government decided to re-start the plan . In 2006, it awarded a construction contract to the Russian firm AtomStroyExport, which put forward a bid in cooperation with the French-German company Areva NP. The reactors planned in Belene are of a new Russian design, for which no safety assessment exists and which has never before been built in Europe.
