Turkey closing in on nuclear energy aspirations

Kyodo Pictures/Reuters

• First power plant next year
• Due to have started in 2023
• Three more planned

Turkey’s first nuclear power plant reactor will come online in 2025, two years behind schedule, the country’s energy minister has confirmed. 

Three more will follow in the next three years as part of Turkey’s efforts to diversify energy production and reduce carbon emissions. 

The first reactor at the $20 billion Akkuyu nuclear power plant, in the southern province of Mersin, is already 90 percent complete.

“Today is a special day in terms of being a milestone but we have bigger goals ahead of us,” the energy and natural resources minister, Alparslan Bayraktar, said on December 13.

“We need to have all four reactors in operation by 2028 so Turkey will join the league of those who produce electricity from nuclear energy.”

The Akkuyu plant is being built by the Russian state atomic energy corporation, Rosatom, and will have a combined capacity of 4,800 megawatts. When fully operational, the four reactors will provide 10 percent of Turkey’s electricity needs.  

It will also be the first of at least three nuclear power plants Turkey aims to have online by 2050. The country plans to build a second in the northwestern Thrace region, the area of Turkey that lies in Europe. 

A third will be built in the Black Sea province of Sinop. Both will have a similar capacity to the Akkuyu nuclear power plant. 

There are also plans for a series of small modular reactors with a combined output of 5,000 megawatts in regions across Turkey, boosting and diversifying capacity.

Clean energy strategy

The country’s appetite for electricity is forecast to increase by 4 percent a year through to the middle of the century. Nuclear power plants are seen as crucial in the switch to clean energy. 

Turkey is the largest single consumer of coal for electricity generation in Europe, now outstripping long-term leaders Germany and Poland. 

Replacing carbon-fuelled power plants has become a priority for the country. The Akkuyu project is expected to reduce emissions by at least 18 million tonnes of CO2 each year, more than 3 percent of Turkey’s total emissions. 

The Turkish government is investing heavily in other renewable power sources. But Büşra Zeynep Özdemir, an energy researcher with the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research, said there were storage challenges in generating electricity from wind, solar and hydropower.

“At this point, zero-emission nuclear power plants create an uninterrupted energy supply when electricity cannot be produced from renewable sources to the required level,” she tells AGBI.

The Akkuyu project has been plagued by problems. 

Three leading Turkish companies which were initially part of the consortium to build and operate the plant – Cengiz, Kolin and Kalyon – withdrew from the project in mid-2018. 

They failed to reach an agreement about the commercial terms of their partnership with Rosatom.

The project is also running behind schedule. The first reactor was due to start supplying the grid in 2023, the centenary of the founding of the Turkish republic. The other reactors were slated for 2025. 

But work slowed during the Covid pandemic, while the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine also caused problems.

Sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West made it difficult to transfer funds, as Russian banks were blacklisted and accounts frozen. 

In addition, technology transfers for the project by the German company Siemens Energy were blocked by Berlin. 

Concerns were raised during the planning stage of the Akkuyu nuclear plant over environmental risks. In 2023 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in southern Turkey had its epicentre 190 kilometres from Mersin. 

According to a Turkish energy ministry official, the Akkuyu plant is designed to withstand a 9.0-magnitude quake. It also has a monitoring network “in order to monitor and assess the impact of seismic activity.” 

While the plant may be earthquake-resistant, however, the country hopes its new generational capacity will represent a seismic shift in Turkey’s energy industry.