Turkey's Readiness to Launch Its First Nuclear Power Plant with Five Times the Capacity of Bushehr

Four years after the launch of the UAE's nuclear power plant, Turkey is preparing to launch its first nuclear power plant with five times the capacity of the Bushehr plant, without resorting to uranium enrichment and enduring international sanctions. On Sunday, September 9, Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the first reactor of the 'Akkuyu' power plant will be launched next year, and by 2028, about 10% of the country's electricity will be supplied by this plant. Each of the four reactors at the 'Akkuyu' plant has a capacity of 1200 megawatts, making the total capacity of this nuclear power plant five times that of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The UAE also launched its first nuclear reactor in 2020 and last year produced three times the nuclear electricity of the Bushehr plant, which is Iran's only nuclear power plant, and continues to develop its nuclear power plants to meet a quarter of its electricity needs. The early, cheap, and non-controversial development of nuclear electricity production in Turkey and the UAE comes at a time when Iran, claiming to produce nuclear electricity, has been under severe international sanctions for over a decade due to a lack of transparency in its uranium enrichment process, which also has military applications. Despite suffering hundreds of billions of dollars in losses from sanctions, the share of nuclear electricity in Iran's total electricity production is only one percent. Saudi Arabia has also targeted the launch of 16 nuclear power plants by 2030. A key point in Turkey's nuclear electricity development is that the Russian company 'Rosatom' is responsible for the development of this plant; a company that, after two decades of delay, launched the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Meanwhile, the Russian company had started the development of the 'Akkuyu' nuclear power plant in Turkey four years ago with five times the capacity of the Bushehr plant. Last year, 440 nuclear power plants in 30 countries with a capacity of 372,000 megawatts were active worldwide. The capacity of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran is 1000 megawatts.