AtkinsRealis anticipates Turkiye’s early nuclear assessment will be completed after summer

Ian Edwards, president and CEO of AtkinsRealis, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the company and their plans for the future.

ISTANBUL -- Canada’s AtkinsRealis anticipates that Turkiye will complete an early review of its CANDU reactors following an information exchange later this summer, which may lead to concrete talks for a nuclear plant bid, a top company official said.

Turkiye’s first nuclear plant is being built by Russia’s Rosatom and Ankara has been talking to South Korea’s KEPCO and China’s SPIC for the next two plants. AtkinsRealis is the latest to open talks and vie for the job.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding with state plant operator TUNAS in March to evaluate the applicability of the reactor technology in Turkiye. Ankara followed up with on-site visits to Romania’s Cernavoda and Canada’s Darlington CANDU nuclear plants, by two high-profile ministers last month.

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“We are working towards providing all the information that TUNAS needs to write its report this summer. We’ve got five working teams... to give TUNAS a huge amount of information to be able to make a recommendation to decision-makers,” Gary Rose, Executive Vice President of AtkinsRealis, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a nuclear industry gathering in Istanbul.

The first unit of Turkiye’s US-$20 billion, 4.8 GW nuclear plant is expected to go online this year. That still leaves a 2.4 GW generation gap in Turkiye’s 2035 interim nuclear energy goals, indicating Ankara needs to move quickly to find a partner for the second plant.

(Reporting by Can Sezer; Editing by Daren Butler)