A partnership led by Russian state firm Atomstroyexport on Wednesday submitted the only bid in a tender to build and operate Turkey's first nuclear power plant, a senior energy official said.
The consortium, which also includes Turkey's Park Termik, was among 13 foreign and local companies which had expressed interest in building a 4,000-megawatt plant at Akkuyu, in Mersin province on the Mediterranean coast.
The tender commission will examine whether the bid is in line with technical specifications and pass it on to Turkey's atomic energy agency for further evaluation, said Haci Duran Gokkaya, the director of TETAS, the state company that will eventually market the plant's power production.
If the bid is deemed suitable it will be submitted to the cabinet for final approval.
Details of Atomstroyexport's offer will be made public in the later stages of the process, Gokkaya said.
Turkish authorities insisted on holding Wednesday's tender even though some of the interested companies had asked for a delay in the competition due to global market turbulence.
Among the companies which picked up bid specifications were AECL of Canada, Vinci Construction Grand Projects of France, Itochu Corp. of Japan, China Nuclear Power Components and Germany's RWE.
The lack of bidders could force Turkey to call off the current tender, observers say.
Turkey plans to build three nuclear power plants in hopes of preventing a possible energy shortage and reducing dependence on foreign supplies but the project has met with fierce resistance from environmentalists.
Scores of anti-nuclear activists protested in front of the energy ministry as the tender was being held.
Turkey's earlier plans for a reactor at Akkuyu was scrapped in July 2000 amid financial difficulties and protests from environmentalists in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus.
Opponents of the project argued that the proposed site was only 25 kilometres (15 miles) from a seismic fault line.
Criticism to Akkuyu grew after a strong earthquake, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, rocked the nearby province of Adana in 1998, killing more than 140 people.
A possible site for one of the other reactors is the Black Sea city of Sinop, in the north of the country, where the locals have also launched a campaign against the power plant.
