Russia’s Rosatom has said it is ready to consider the option of building new nuclear power plants in Bulgaria despite the failure of an agreement to build one in Belene.

“Everything is negotiable,” TASS quoted Rosatom CEO Sergey Kirienko as saying in an interview with TV channel Russia 24 on Thursday.

"We work with the Bulgarian nuclear energy sector at present. If decisions are of professional and not political nature, we’ll always reach an agreement,” Kirienko added.

The head of the Russian state atomic energy corporation spoke on the same day when Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boyko Borisov announced in Sofia that the International Court of Arbitration in Paris had ruled in favour of Russia’s Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Rosatom, over the abandoned plan for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Belene, on the Danube river.

Rosatom filed the lawsuit against Bulgaria’s state-owned National Electricity Company (NEK) after Borisov’s first cabinet ditched in March 2012 the Belene project, for which two reactors of 1,000 MW each and the respective power generation equipment had already been ordered by a previous government back in 2008.

While Bulgaria says that NEK will have to pay EUR 550 M to Atomstroyexport in compensation for the ordered equipment and the work done on the project, Rosatom claims that the arbitration court had awarded EUR 620 M to the Russian company.

Bulgaria will have to decide now whether to buy one of the reactors, which has already been built, or agree with Russia to sell it to a third party.

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