The Bulgairan President Georgi Parvanov declared Tuesday that Bulgaria had to start immediately preparations for relaunching Unit 3 of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant because of the terminated supplies of Russian gas.

At 3:30 am Tuesday morning all natural gas supplies for Bulgaria and the adjacent Balkan countries were cut off at the Ukraine-Romania border without any explanations.

The President Parvanov said Unit 3 of the Kozloduy NPP, which was shut down together with Unit 4 on January 1, 2006, according to an agreement with the EU, could be restarted under Article 36 of Bulgaria's EU Accession Treaty, which stipulated that the shut reactors could be relaunched temporarily in the event of a crisis situation with energy resources.

"In such a crisis situation, and there can be no greater crisis than this one, we are entitled to restart the two reactors. According to my information from the last couple of days, this could be done with Unit 3 of the Kozloduy NPP. Additional work will be needed to relaunch Unit 4", the President declared.

In his words, Unit 3 of the Kozloduy Plant could be restarted within one month.

"I hope the Russian-Ukraine gas dispute would be resolved by then. But if this does not happen, I would really like to see, and I expect that our European partners would be understanding to our situation, and that they would not resist such a move on our part", the President concluded.

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