Major trading house Itochu Corp. is backing away from Sinop nuclear power plant project in Turkey, owing to a surge in safety-related costs. Itochu withdrew at the end of March from a consortium that had been conducting a feasibility study for a 4,500-megawatt plant in the Black Sea coast city of Sinop. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries continue to participate in the study.
It is now deemed difficult for the plant to become operational in 2023 as targeted, amid surging costs linked to safety measures and with total costs for the project ballooning to more than double the initially estimated 2 trillion yen (about $18.5 billion). Safety-related costs to build nuclear plants have soared since the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, triggered by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
