A total of 15 people have formed a committee in Bulgaria that will launch a petition for a referendum on the fate of the abandoned Belene Nuclear Power Plant project.

Sergey Stanishev, leader of left-wing Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), BSP lawmakers Rumen Ovcharov and Yanaki Stoilov, Belene Mayor Petar Dulev, two former directors of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant, as well as several professors and academicians are among the committee's members.

The initiative committee is headed by Prof. Stefan Vodenicharov.

Vodenicharov stated that "a country that has nuclear energy would have a strong economy."

"Bulgaria should have one more nuclear power plant," he declared, as cited by the BGNES news agency.

After almost three years of balking at it, Bulgaria's centrist-right GERB government abandoned the NPP project in March 2012, declaring it to be "economically unfeasible". The plant was supposed to be built by Russian company Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Rosatom.

The construction of the Belene Nuclear Power Plant would have cost EUR 10.35 B in the best case scenario, according to the estimates of Bulgarian government's consultant for the project, the HSBC bank.