Vietnam scraps huge nuclear power plant projects
Power-hungry Vietnam scrapped plans for two multi-billion dollar nuclear power plants on November 22, citing environmental and financial reasons after the cost of the projects skyrocketed. The two plants in central Ninh Thuan province would have had a combined capacity of 4,000 megawatts and were to be developed with assistance from Russian state company Rosatom and the Japanese consortium JINED. The cost of the nuclear power plants, slated to be the first in Southeast Asia, doubled since they were first tabled in 2009 to an estimated $18 billion, officials said earlier. The government said costs mushroomed as developers sought more advanced technology following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. “The project was suspended not due to technological reasons, but the country’s current economic situation,” the government said on its website.
