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Rosatom wins tender for construction of NPP in Jordan

An overall capacity of Jordan’s two-reactor NPP will be 2,000 megawatts

MOSCOW, November 1 (Itar-Tass) - Russia’s Atomic Energy State Corporation (Rosatom) has won a tender for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Jordan, a Rosatom official told Itar-Tass on Friday.

Rosatom have received an official notification from the Jordanian Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) that the Russian proposal won a high priority status, Director of Rosatom’s Communication Department Sergei Novikov said. “Russia’s offer was the best from the viewpoint of construction technologies and safety systems,” he quoted the document.

An overall capacity of Jordan’s two-reactor NPP will be 2,000 megawatts.

In May 2009, Rosatom Director General Sergei Kiriyenko and JAEC Chairman Khaled Toukan put their signatures under a cooperation agreement on peaceful use of atomic energy. The tender for the construction of a one-reactor NPP in Jordan with the subsequent construction of a second reactor was announced in January 2011. Russia’s nuclear plant design company Atomstroiexport handed over its technical offer for the NPP construction to the contractor in June 2011.

Apart from Atomstroiexport, the tender offer was co-drafted by Atomenergoproekt, Gidropress, the Kurchatov Institute, TVEL and a number of other key organizations of the atomic energy sector. Russia’s rival at the tender was the Japanese-French consortium Mitsubishi Heavy Industries - Areva.

According to earlier reports, the NPP will be built on the “build-own-operate” (BOO) principle. The NPP will be built by a joint venture, in which Jordan will have the controlling stake (51 percent), and Rosatom (or its subsidiary) will hold 49 percent. The parties will finance the project in compliance with their stakes.

The BOO principle was firstly used by Rosatom in Turkey, where Russian specialists are building Turkey’s first NPP Akkuyu (four power units with a total capacity of 4.8 GW), but in this case the state corporation will hold the controlling stake in the plant. Rosatom will be a shareholder in the Finnish Hanhikivi-1 NPP project, where the state corporation may receive a 34-percent stake. However, presently Rosatom has no operating BOO projects abroad.

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