Bulgaria announced in May 2004 that it will build a second nuclear power plant to replace two Soviet-era reactors at its Kozloduy facility which the European Union shut down right before the country’s accession in 2007.

Prime Minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg said the second plant will be built at Belene, in the north of the country, where work began in 1987 but was suspended in 1991 after pressure from environmentalists.

"The government has decided to complete the construction of the power plant at Belene. It will be the biggest investment made in Bulgaria in the past 20 years," he told 1,000 residents gathered in Belene's central square.

Saxe-Coburg said the power plant here should be operational in 2010, four years after the planned closure of two 440 megawatt reactors at Kozloduy.

The new plant will "allow Bulgaria to retain its strong position on the region's energy market," the prime minister added.

The country in 2003 exported some five billion megawatt hours of electricity, mostly to Greece, Turkey, Serbia and Macedonia.

The Kozloduy plant in 2002 had already shut down two older Soviet-era 440-megawatt reactors under pressure from the EU. 

The Kozloduy plant, which is also situated in the north on the banks of the Danube, has two other more modern 1,000 megawatt reactors that do not raise any concerns.

The plant provided 47 percent of Bulgaria's electricity.

The Bulgarian government spent EUR 1.3 B at Belene, a town on the Danube near the border with Romania, before the project was abandoned two years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Several independent economic analysts expressed doubt about the wisdom of building a new nuclear power plant which they believe will only start making a profit in 20 years.

Some twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster and faced with "the ominous prospect of turning the country into s disco club", Bulgaria's previously ruling Socialist-left coalition set its hopes on an ambitious solution - the construction of Belene Nuclear Power Plant's two 1,000-megawatt reactors near the Danube town of Belene.

The country started pushing the billion euro project in a bid to restore its position as a major electricity exporter in the Balkans, fanning a heated controversy.

The frequent U-turns of Bulgaria's current center-right prime minister over the project fueled suspicions that links between the mafia and the political system run deep in the energy sector.

This is the reason why the announcement in March that the center-right government of Boyko Borisov has abandoned plans to build a new nuclear power station at Belene left many Bulgarians thinking this is too good to be true.

The cost of the Belene project – which may well exceed ten billion euros, making electricity exports unprofitable – tops the list of criticisms, along with the environmental risks, the danger of seismic activity in the region and, last but not least, Bulgaria's dependence on Russia.

For a country that has suffered from the Chernobyl disaster and decommissioned several nuclear reactors over safety concerns, Bulgaria's pursuit of atomic energy is surprising at best, critics say.

They point out that nobody has expressed seriously desire to invest in the Russian nuclear project in the past four years after Germany's RWE pulled out due to "funding concerns".

For years on end Belene has been a barren land, where billions of euros have been buried. Bulgarian taxpayers already had to dig deep into their pockets for the project, even though it has stalled over lack of a new investor and funding.

On January 27, 2013, Bulgarians will have to answer in a referendum the following question: "Should nuclear energy be developed in Bulgaria through the construction of new nuclear power units?"

Polls show that the referendum will not be valid as between 1.6 million and 2.1 million people are expected to cast a ballot, far below the threshold of 4 million needed to validate the vote.

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