Sofia University has an environmental club called Uneco, which was established by some of its students. At its monthly meetings, some of the most pressing environmental problems related to the country and to Sofia are discussed. Occasionally, when Jan Haverkamp, Greenpeace energy expert for Bulgaria and the Central and Eastern European region, comes to the country, a meeting with him and the students is arranged as well.

This month’s discussion was called Belene Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) – For or Against. The students invited, besides Haverkamp, Atanas Semov, chairperson of the “committee to save the third and fourth units of Kozloduy nuclear power plant”, as well as representatives of the Economy and Energy Ministry, to defend the position supporting the development of nuclear energy in Bulgaria.

However, representatives of the ministry did not show up, nor did Semov. At the last moment, he said that he had an important meeting, while the ministry couldn’t find anybody to speak to the students as to why nuclear energy was necessary for Bulgaria.

The ministry instead called Sofia University’s rector and asked him if he knew that the students were planning to embarrass the ministry.

The ministry also said that the invitation it received did not look serious enough, so they did not respect it.

In his turn, the rector of Sofia University, who permits the students to use a room for their environmental lectures but is not, in particular, informed of which lecture is about what, called the club’s chairperson and said that he was not happy about not being informed of the nuclear energy discussion.

But what else the ministry told the rector and how far back their relationship goes is not known.

However, the more important question remains: why the Economy and Energy Ministry did not send even a single person to defend a position on nuclear energy. Did they have nothing to say, or did they think that the students did not need to know what was going on in the country in which they live, work and grow? Or perhaps the ministry thought that everything about Belene NPP’s construction had already been decided, so no further discussion was necessary.

But this was neither Haverkamp’s opinion, nor the view of Greenpeace, the Bulgarian Green Policy Institute or the about 150 citizens, journalists and environmentalists who were waiting to attend the discussion on nuclear energy.

After an interesting conversation with Haverkamp at the time of the discussion-that-was-not, I found out that the Bulgarian Academy of Science (BAS) had to pronounce its decision on the seismicity of the region where Belene was planned to be built. In 1977 in the same region, one of the largest earthquakes in Bulgaria occurred, thus killing about 120 people. At that time, when Belene NPP’s construction had first started, BAS issued a survey on the seismicity, stating that it was too high, and based on that survey, the government called off construction of the NPP.

However, the current BAS study says that an earthquake in Belene cannot destroy buildings, which, from an geological point of view, is quite ridiculous and impossible: over such a short period of time, the layers of the Earth cannot adjust so well that no further problems can be anticipated.

Unfortunately, the current study has resulted again in an alarm on which many institutions in the country, including state science researchers, may be encouraged to provide opinions, and these probably in favour of other state bodies or private businesses.

The institution ultimately responsible, the European Commission, has, therefore, been strongly advised to send its own researchers or to base its final decision not only on locally provided information but also on independent scientific investigations.

Besides being a quite environmentally unsustainable decision for a country and a region, nuclear energy creates nuclear waste that would remain a problem of the state. It is radioactive for at least 100 000 years and science has not yet found a form of storage that would remain sure for such a period of time. The only certain way to make the nuclear waste safe is to launch it into the orbit of the sun, but this method is still too expensive and no country practises it yet.