Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant

The Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant is a nuclear power plant in Bulgaria situated north of Sofia and east of Kozloduy, a town on the Danube river, near the border with Romania. It is the country's only nuclear power plant and the largest in the region. The construction of the first reactor began on 6 April 1970. Kozloduy NPP currently manages two pressurized water reactors with a total gross output of 2000 MWe and 1966 MW net. Units 5 and 6, constructed in 1987 and 1991 respectively, are VVER-1000 reactors. By 2017 Unit 5 was to be upgraded to reach a capacity of 1,100 MWe, as part of a programme to extend the life of the unit by 30 years. A seventh 1,000 MW unit may be installed, using parts from the terminated Belene project for which Bulgaria has paid 600 M EUR. An eighth unit is also under consideration. The older and smaller Units 1 to 4 were all shut down by 2007. Two spent fuel storage facilities are part of the power plant. The nuclear power plant "Kozloduy" was the first nuclear power plant in Bulgaria and in Southeast Europe. The beginning of Bulgarian nuclear energy was established on July 15, 1966, with the signing of an agreement on cooperation between Bulgaria and the then-Soviet Union for the construction of a nuclear power plant. After a detailed technical and economic analysis, the construction site was chosen to be on the Danube River near Kozloduy. The Soviet Union provided the main equipment, and individual equipment was supplied by the then-German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Ground was first broken on October 14, 1969 and in April 1970, large-scale construction activities began, in which over a hundred thousand workers and engineers participated. Kozloduy NPP previously operated four older reactors of the VVER-440/230 design, but under a 1993 agreement between the European Commission and the Bulgarian government, Units 1 and 2 were taken off-line at the beginning of 2004. An unpublished 1995 report by the United States Department of Energy had supposedly listed those units among the world's "ten most dangerous reactors".