On March 30, Lithuania and Japan’s Hitachi Corporation initialed the concession agreement to build a Baltic regional nuclear power plant at Visaginas in Lithuania. The Lithuanian government had selected Hitachi and its subsidiary, Hitachi-General Electric of the US, as the strategic investor for this project,... MORE

Bulgaria scrapped plans to build its second 2,000-megawatt Belene nuclear power plant (Belene NPP) on the Danube River (Trud, Capital, Dnevnik, BNT, March 28). The Belene NPP is the second Bulgarian-Russian energy project that Sofia quit in the last four months. In December 2011, Sofia... MORE

Several Eurasian leaders were among the 54 heads of state, deputy prime ministers, or foreign ministers who attended the March 26-27 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea. The main objective of the summit was to prevent non-state actors such as terrorists or criminals from... MORE

As expected (see EDM, January 3, 4, 5), the Nabucco consortium has decided to reconfigure its project for a new role: a European continuation of the Azerbaijani-Turkish, Trans-Anatolia Gas Pipeline (TANAP) project. As TANAP plans to replace Nabucco on Turkey’s territory, Nabucco would link up... MORE

In Soviet times, the Kazakh republic was a testing ground for nuclear explosions, having witnessed more than 400 nuclear blasts at the site in Semipalatinsk. Much has changed since Kazakhstan gained its independence in 1991. It renounced the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal and has... MORE

On March 22 and 25, Romania’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Cristian Diaconescu, announced on television that a “legal dispute” (“litigium”) exists between Romania and Bulgaria over the delimitation of their maritime border, continental shelf, and exclusive economic zones in the Black Sea. The dispute affects, in... MORE

The European Commission has ruled that the Gazprom-led consortium, Nord Stream, must allow other gas suppliers to share the capacities of that consortium’s pipelines on German territory (Kommersant, March 15; Interfax, March 19). This requirement, known as third-party access, is based on the EU’s competition... MORE

China’s dependence on other nations’ coal exports is growing. In 2009, China imported 126 million tons (Mt) of coal and became a net coal importer. In 2011, China sourced 182 Mt of coal from overseas suppliers, and overtook Japan as the world’s top coal importer.... MORE

Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Barack Obama will likely discuss Kazakhstan’s proposal to establish the world’s first international nuclear fuel bank when they meet at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul in a few weeks. In February, Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov (Kazakhstan General Newswire, February 28)... MORE

Russian oil companies Gunvor, Rosneft, and Lukoil are spearheading what looks like an acquisition spree of refining capacities in Western Europe. Some West-European authorities accept without qualms and even welcome such Russian takeovers, apparently viewing them as crisis-relief measures for stricken European refineries and workforces... MORE