Nuclear energy in central and eastern Europe

Bulgaria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia have all nuclear power plants on their soil, their entry to the European Union has counter-balanced the number of member states that are not in favour of nuclear energy. All these countries committed themselves to upgrade their installations to European safety standards. This work is going on and new programs for service life extension and for construction of new units have been launched. All these countries have a strong culture and know-how in nuclear engineering inherited from soviet era. They stay very active in this field, for instance the ALLEGRO project that is carried out by a collaboration between Hungarian, Slovak, Czech research institutes and western partners aims at building the first demonstration plant of the future fourth generation reactor: a fast reactor cooled by gas. The situation of each country plus Croatia (that is a candidate to full E.U. membership) is reviewed. (A.C.)