The abandoned Belene Nuclear Power Plant project is not irreversibly dead and a referendum on its fate should be called, according to Sergey Stanishev, leader of the left-wing oppositional Bulgarian Socialist Party.

The current centrist-right GERB government will probably have to pay more for terminating the Bulgarian-Russian project than the previous two governments that backed it, Stanishev has claimed.

The former Bulgarian PM (2005-2009) further noted that no one knows how expensive it would be to place the nuclear reactor initially meant for Belene at the Kozloduy NPP instead.

The Bulgarian government recently announced its plans to expand its already existing NPP after giving up building a new one at Belene. Earlier, cabinet members had said they plan to mount the nuclear reactor earmarked for the Belene NPP as a seventh unit at the Kozloduy NPP and to build a gas power plant on the site of the scrapped Belene NPP project.

According to Stanishev, the government's decision to drop Belene means a guaranteed market for foreign-owned thermal power plants within the Maritsa Iztok Complex, which would sell their energy at much higher prices than Kozloduy's.