Sixty-one organizations and several dozen individuals today asked President Clinton and Vice-President Gore to reconsider their support for a controversial nuclear power project in Turkey, that would be built at a seismically suspect site at Akkuyu. The Turkish government is expected to announce soonpossibly as early as Tuesday, February 1its choice of a reactor vendor to build what would be the nation’s first atomic power plant.
According to the mainstream Turkish daily Milliyet, Vice-President Al Gore wrote a letter to the Turkish energy minister in December in support of a bid for the project made by a consortium led by Westinghouse (now owned by British Nuclear Fuels, Ltd.) and Mitsubishi. A January 22, 2000 report in Milliyet said that U.S. Ambassador Mark Parris also has been lobbying Turkey to choose the Westinghouse consortiuma lobbying effort that included meetings with the nation’s President and Deputy Prime Minister. In addition, the U.S. Export-Import Bank already has promised $40 million in loans for Westinghouse and Bechtel (which is in a consortium led by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., or AECL) for preliminary work on the project.
There are two other bidders for the proposed project: AECL is offering its heavy water CANDU reactor technology and another consortium is led by Germany’s Siemens Corporation. However, the German government recently said it will not allow export credits under its HERMES program for the Siemens bid, because of the project’s questionable economics.
The letter sent today to President Clinton, Vice-President Gore and U.S. Export-Import Bank Chairman James Harmon, cited four key reasons for the U.S. to end its support for the project. These include the earthquake risk at Akkuyu. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified 31 earthquakes within 60 miles of the site just since 1973. The Turkish government has refused to publicly release copies of its own geological reports on the site.
Also mentioned in the letter are concerns over nuclear weapons proliferation, human rights abuses in Turkey and the fact that nuclear power is an inappropriate energy option for that nation.
Copies of the letter and basic translations of the Milliyet article are available on NIRS’ website, www.nirs.org