The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz wants to prevent the completion of the Mochovce nuclear power plant in Nitra region in Slovakia by all possible means, wrote the TASR press agency on Monday. "I had a phone call with (Slovak) Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini to dissuade him from it. I clearly interpreted to him Austria's concerns in terms of safety, and I asked him for the highest possible level of transparency," stated Kurz.
The completion of the project has been delayed by nine years so far and numerous questions have been raised regarding its safety and financing. The budget of the project has been increased eleven times. According to the latest information, the third block should be finished at the beginning of 2020 and the fourth block one year later.
Richard Sulík, chair of the opposition Freedom and Solidarity party, said that the former Prime Minister Robert Fico is responsible for the current situation. According to him, in 2006 Fico forced the Italian Enel company, one of the parents of the Slovak Electricity company, into the completion of the third and the fourth bock of the plant, even though he knew that this company has no experience with nuclear power plants.
Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini said in April that he had the feeling that companies in charge of the completion are intentionally make the process a never-ending story, in order to ensure sure business in the nuclear energy sector in the future.
Austria has been against the building of two reactor blocks at the plant for a long time, and Global 2000 NGO has been organising a campaign against the launch of Mochovce's third block.
