[cdn-nucl-l] Vietnam to choose reactor vendor by formal bidding arrangement

[Radik Ixanov <ixanov@yahoo.com>]

Posted by www.platts.com on May 04, 2006.


Vietnam will select a foreign vendor to supply a
turnkey nuclear power plant earmarked for construction
beginning in 2011 only after the country has conducted
a formal bidding process in which competing suppliers
will be asked to take part, a senior Vietnamese
official told Platts.
“We will organize a competitive bidding process, just
as in China,” said Vuong Huu Tan, the chairman of the
Vietnam Atomic Energy Commission, or VAEC.
After setting up power reactor construction projects
during the 1980s and 1990s with industry in France,
Canada, and Russia, on the basis of bilateral
diplomatic arrangements, last year China introduced an
open international competition for four advanced PWRs
to be constructed at two new sites. A decision by
China on vendors for these projects has yet to be
announced.
In recent years, diplomatic and industry sources have
suggested that Vietnam might, following China’s
example, begin its first nuclear power plant project
on the basis of a closed bilateral cooperation
agreement and contract with one of the same vendors —
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.; Areva; or
Atomstroyexport — which thus far have
built reactors in China. Since the 1990s, nuclear
industry and government missions have been sent to
Vietnam from Canada, France, Russia, and the US. More
recently, Japan and South Korea have established
contacts with VAEC to explore the possibility of
nuclear equipment business for Japanese and Korean
firms.
Tan said that a feasibility study for Vietnam’s
initial nuclear power plant project is being carried
out as part of a broader investigation into how
Vietnam will meet anticipated power demand. The
investigation was launched by the Ministry of Industry
for the period 2004-2010. The study
was ordered in anticipation that Vietnam would be
ready to construct two to four power reactors with a
total capacity between 2,000 MW and 4,000 MW by 2020.
If that goal is realized, Tan said, the reactors would
meet between 5% and 9% of Vietnam’s forecast power
demand in 2020.

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