Bulgaria Sets Nuclear Referendum For January

The town of Belene, Bulgaria | Photo by Wikipedia Commons

The referendum was initially triggered by the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party's desire to revive the abandoned Belene nuclear power plant project.

The party launched a petition for a referendum on the fate of the Russian-Bulgarian project after the ruling centrist-right GERB scrapped the project in March.

The original question of the petition was planned to read: “Should nuclear energy be developed in Bulgaria through the building of a Nuclear Plant at the Belene site?”

However, the GERB majority in parliament decided to alter the question, removing any specific reference to the Belene project. The ruling party stated that a referendum on a particular project would be unconstitutional.

The edited question, as proposed by GERB, postulates: “Should atomic energy be developed in Bulgaria through the building of a new Atomic Plant?”

Bulgaria's government remains tangled up in a billion euro dispute with Russia over the termination of the Belene project.

Last month the recently registered US consortium Global Power Consortium expressed interest in taking over the project to install two 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactors at Belene and build it without state funds or guarantees.

However, the companies behind the consortium are as yet unknown.