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Some 200 young environmentalists rallied in Sofia Wednesday to protest against the building of the Belene NPP. Photo by BGNES
A couple of hundred environmentalists rallied in downtown Sofia Wednesday night to protest against Bulgaria's anyway troubled Belene nuclear power plant project.
The protest was organized by the youth organizations of the Bulgarian Greens, a political party with environmental focus, and two rightist parties – the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) and Democrats for Strong Bulgaria (DSB), which together form the Blue Coalition, a former ally and currently a rightist opposition to the Borisov Cabinet and the ruling center-right GERB party.
On March 26, the Bulgarian Greens initiated the founding of a Balkan Anti-Nuclear Coalition, which includes green parties and NGOs from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey; the coalition insists on a permanent ban of all nuclear facilities in Southeast Europe.
"No to the nuclear bomb in Belene," shouted the young environmentalists demanding a referendum on the construction of what is supposed to become Bulgaria's second nuclear power plant.
Some of the protesters wore gas masks and radiation protection attire.
The protesters said the Belene was "Russian bomb", an expensive and useless project.
The Facebook group of the protest originally had 500 people who confirmed they will attend the rally.
After it was first started in the 1980s, the construction of Bulgaria's second nuclear power plant at Belene on the Danube was stopped in the early 1990s over lack of money and environmental protests. The project for the 2000-MW Belene NPP was restarted in 2007-2008, with Russian company Atomstroyexport selected to build it.
However, the Bulgarian government has been unable to secure a strategic foreing investor, and has falled out with Atomstroyexport's parent company Rosatom over the price of the plant's construction.
A day ahead of the deadline for Sofia and Moscow to agree on whether to build two 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactors at Belene, in the north, officials refused to provide any information about how the project will develop.
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