Turkish government and private companies are in talks with the U.S. for purchases of small nuclear reactors (SMRs), as the country looks to wean itself off coal, according to a report.
“There is a serious interest in nuclear energy as a way to replace coal-fired power plants,” Justin Friedman, senior advisor for commercial competitiveness in nuclear energy at the U.S. State Department told Bloomberg on Tuesday.
Friedman said that purchase of as many as 35 SMRs are possibile as Türkiye wants to generate 20 gigawatts of electricity from nuclear energy by 2050.
“Now the question is how we work together, government-to-government, to pave way for business-to-business cooperation,” he was cited as per the report.
Türkiye’s energy ministry declined to comment.
US SMR manufacturers include NuScale Power Corporation, and the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower LLC.
Meanwhile, the country’s first nuclear plant, Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), being built by the Russian state-owned company Rosatom as part of an intergovernmentral agreement between Ankara and Moscow, is nearing completion in southern Türkiye. The government is also negotiating a second power plant with Rosatom that may be built in Sinop on the Black Sea coast.
Türkiye has 68 coal-fired power stations, which met about a third of the country's electricity needs last year, according to the energy ministry. Türkiye aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2053.
