A contract with Russian group Rosatom to build a nuclear reactor in northern Finland has been canceled due to additional ‘risks’ from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish-majority consortium driving the project said on Monday. .
“The war in Ukraine has aggravated the risks of the project” located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, justifies the Fennovoima consortium in a statement, stressing that the Rosatom subsidiary involved in the project, RAOS Project, “was unable to mitigate these risks”.
Fennovoima, two-thirds owned by a consortium of Finnish companies and 34% by Rosatom, also invokes the “significant delays and the inability” of the subsidiary of the Russian nuclear giant “to complete” the Hanhikivi- 1.
“This means that cooperation with RAOS Project is terminated with immediate effect (…) and that work on the Hanhikivi-1 site” with the Russian group is complete.
Estimated at more than 7.5 billion euros, the 1,200 megawatt reactor project, located in Pyhajöki in northern Finland, dates back to 2010 and had already suffered from numerous delays and uncertainties.
Significant preparatory work has already been undertaken, but the final building permit had not yet been granted.
The decision to cancel the contract with Rosatom “is not taken lightly”. “In such a large project there are significant complexities and decisions are only made after thorough assessments,” says Fennovoima.
On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish government had already announced that it would reassess the project, one of the main industrial sites involving a Russian company in the European Union.
The latest schedule announced last year by Fennovoima as part of its building permit application aimed to start construction in 2023 and commissioning in 2029.
Finland currently has four fully operational reactors at two power plants, supplying around 30% of the country’s electricity.
A 1650 megawatt EPR reactor was also commissioned in March at the Olkiluoto site, with full capacity operation scheduled for September.