Three months after the nuclear tender fiasco, Turkish Atomic Energy Agency has announced that Russian Atomstroyexport’s bid is meeting their so-called technical criteria. With this decision, they managed to contradict one of the few criteria they set in the beginning such as the technology should be “proven”. As a matter of fact, they had a whole chapter devoted explaining that the technology should have been “proven” in other countries. However when they received only one bid they decided to bin their own criteria and approve a prototype. How assuring for the people of Turkey; that their nuclear regulatory authority does not feel obliged to follow their own criteria.

So lets have a look how the Turkish energy strategy is being planned:

• The tender process was against the competition law.
• The construction license to Akkuyu was given 40 (in writing: forty) years ago, lacking serious considerations such as seismic analysis. If the analysis is done today, Akkuyu would not be given a license.
• Turkish Atomic Energy Agency is contradicting it is own criteria. (More info in Turkish is here )
• One of the proposed reasons to build nuclear power plants was to reduce energy dependency especially from Russia.

So what the energy minister Hilmi Guler of Turkey has been thinking? Well, we are not sure whether he has a smart answer to this question. However if he ever gets the first cement poured to Akkuyu, he sure will have decades to think about it.