In the last days of the week, the Bulgarian government that recently resigned, and in particular the Minister of Economy Dragomir Stoynev, started working feverishly on a project to build a seventh unit at the nuclear power plant of Kozloduy. The first step was signing a shareholders' agreement between the Kozloduy NPP and U.S. company Westinghouse for the construction of the unit. The aim is to establish a joint-stock company in which Bulgarian state ownership will be 70% and the U.S. participation will be 30%.

"Currently, Bulgaria has no financial commitments related to the agreement with the U.S. company," said in an interview with BNT Minister Stoynev, adding that the price of the project (5.3 billion dollars) quoted by media was preliminary. Skeptics, however, point out that there are no cases in which the actual price is lower than the benchmark one. On the contrary, in a number of cases the price jumps.

Let us recall that the Kozloduy NPP was built and modernized using only Russian technology. Minister Stoynev claims that adding a U.S. reactor would mean diversification in the sphere of energy. But how much will the end customer pay for a kilowatt of energy? Some say that for the price of 5 billion dollars two last-generation Russian reactors could have been built on the site of the abandoned project for Belene NPP. The Westinghouse unit is so new that this technology cannot be seen implemented anywhere else. Thus Bulgaria can fall into the situation of being a guinea pig.

Finally, many observers point out that the project for a Westingouse unit at Kozloduy NPP started in the dark without public procurement. Some months ago Minister Stoynev returned from a trip to the U.S. and announced that that the American company will be building the reactor. It is now very interesting to see what the position of the European Commission will be. After a similar nontransparent procedure related to the project for the Bulgarian section of the South Stream gas pipeline, the EC made Sofia stop all activities related to the realization of the project. Would the EC be consistent in its policy or would it apply the already known tactics of using double standards?