A partnership led by Russian state firm Atomstroyexport on Monday submitted a revised bid to build and operate Turkey's first nuclear power plant, citing global economic conditions, Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said.
The new bid was handed in just minutes after the tender commission announced that the consortium had offered a unit price of 21.16 cents per kilowatt per hour for supplying electricity to the Turkish power grid.
"The company has conveyed to us a revised price which they said was linked to economic developments in the world," Guler told a press conference, adding that the new bid had not been opened.
TETAS, the state company that will eventually market the plant's power production, will open the revision letter, assess it and pass it on to the cabinet for a final approval, the minister added.
"There is room for bargaining," Guler added, refusing to comment on the intiial offer of the consortium.
The partnership, which also includes Turkey's Park Teknik, was the sole bidder in the tender launched in September to build a 4,800-megawatt nuclear power plant at Akkuyu, in Mersin province on the Mediterranean coast.
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, calling for the cancellation of the tender, as the commission was announcing details of the consortium's initial bid.
Turkey's earlier plans for a reactor at Akkuyu were 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.
After Akkuyu, Ankara plans to build its second nuclear station in the Black Sea city of Sinop, in the north of the country, where the locals have also launched a campaign against the power plant.
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