Turkey on Wednesday reiterated its commitment for a Russian-built nuclear plant in an important show of confidence in atomic energy as Japan tried to prevent major radioactive contamination. President Dmitry Medvedev and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stressed that nuclear power could be safe even for earthquake-prone areas such as Japan and Turkey.
“I am sure that the nuclear power plant to be built in Turkey will be a model for the rest of the world,” Erdoğan said after a meeting with Medvedev in the Kremlin. “We can’t drop joint projects because of earthquakes.” Medvedev said the reactors that Russia plans to construct in Turkey are much newer in design than the ones that are causing trouble in Japan and therefore require no drastic safety improvements, if any, to sustain even the “most devastating” earthquake. That said, Russia is open to discuss “optimizing” the work, he said.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday said plans for a Russian-built plant on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast and a second one for its Black Sea coast, which is under discussion with Tokyo Electric Power Co and Toshiba, won’t be affected by the risk of a natural disaster like the earthquake that struck Japan.
Turkey will not suspend its nuclear projects despite unprecedented damage to Japanese nuclear reactors following its catastrophic earthquake and Turkey’s own seismic vulnerability, according to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“There is no investment without risk,” Erdoğan told reporters on Tuesday as he summarized his government’s policy on nuclear energy. His words come as Germany has decided to take seven of its 17 nuclear reactors offline temporarily for a comprehensive safety check.
Laughing off concerns that are rising globally, Erdoğan said that if people wanted a no-risk environment, they should “not build crude oil lines in their country and not use gas in their kitchens.”
Fears of a possible nuclear meltdown in Japan will not prevent Turkey from going ahead with the construction of atomic power plants, the country’s energy minister, Taner Yıldız, said on Monday.
“The earthquake that occurred in Japan will not affect our plans for the construction of two nuclear power plants,” Yıldız said in an interview with Turkey’s NTV channel. “We should learn lessons from the tragedy that Japan has faced, and we are working in this direction.”
Turkey is crisscrossed by fault lines, and small and medium earthquakes are a near daily occurrence. Two large quakes in 1999 killed more than 20,000 people.”It is a mistake to go nuclear after what has happened in Japan,” Uygar Özeşmi, Greenpeace’s Mediterranean director, said at a news conference. “In a quake-prone country like Turkey, you cannot launch a nuclear power industry.”
