Valentin Mezhevich, First Vice Chairman of Federation Council Committee on Natural Monopolies

– A new NPP may be built near Kaliningrad

The Swedish coalition government has drafted an energy program envisaging the construction of new nuclear power plants, Prime Minister of Sweden Fredrik Reinfeldt said on Feb 5 2009.

I am not afraid that one more region neighboring on Kaliningrad is returning to nuclear energy. The Swedish coalition government has drafted an energy program envisaging the construction of new nuclear power plants. The appearance of such a program in a country that is considered as one of the most ardent opponents of nuclear energy in the world is a real revolution.

But there is quite easy explanation to this. The new energy policy of Sweden is part of the general European trend. A similar situation can be observed in Germany, who once said that it would never build new reactors. If the elections into Bundestag result in the formation of a Christian-Liberal Democratic coalition, Germany may well return to nuclear energy.

Western and Eastern Europes have no alternative to building new reactors and extending the lives of the existing ones. Recently we have observed a new tendency: some Eastern European countries are beginning to fight for the right to restart their Soviet-time reactors. I mean Slovakia and Bulgaria, who have said that they are going to reactivate their Bohunice and Kozloduy NPPs. It has turned out that their harmfulness and technical imperfection were just speculative theory while the expensiveness of gas and oil is harsh reality.

The Russian energy sector is developing in the same direction: we are building nuclear reactors, constantly improving the safety of our projects. We are establishing joint ventures – one example is Siemens – in order to improve the quality of our control and management systems, to develop new investment and administrative approaches, to involve foreign partners in our projects.

Baltic NPP, to be built in Kaliningrad region, is a vivid example of this policy. There we are going to apply the same technologies we are currently applying at Belene NPP (Bulgaria) and to use modern foreign automatic safety systems. 49% of the plant will belong to foreign investors. We are going to build a nuclear power plant in the Baltic region – a region experiencing nuclear renaissance – and by doing this we will show that we are part of the common trend in the energy sector.