ENERGY
Who will pay for Eastern Europe’s nuclear power plants?
July 10, 2024 - Eastern Europe is uniting behind the biggest drive for nuclear capacity in decades, with plans to build a string of new reactors to the tune of almost €130 billion.
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The question, though, is who will pay for it and how much of it becomes reality.
From the Czech Republic to Romania, nations are drawing up plans for what some have called the “biggest project of the century.” They want to build at least a dozen new nuclear units, based on the latest projections gathered by Bloomberg. The first could be operational within a decade.
Former communist states largely inherited existing plants from the proliferation that came online in the 1970s and 1980s. Those are running on borrowed time though. Governments have harnessed the political support for new facilities as the countries grapple with the European Union’s push for greener energy and after nations were forced to wean themselves off cheaper Russian gas.
The challenge is that countries don’t possess the engineering know-how and are struggling to fund the scope of their ambitions, according to officials.