ANKARA, 30 April 2006 — About 4,000 demonstrators rallied in the northern Turkish city of Sinop yesterday, calling on the government to drop plans to build a nuclear power plant in the region and to seek alternative energy sources, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Officials announced earlier this month that Sinop, a coastal city on the Black Sea, 435 kilometers northeast of Ankara, had been chosen as the site where the country’s first nuclear power plant would be built.
“Sinop will not become a Chernobyl,” chanted the demonstrators, who poured into the city from across the country, media reports said. “No passage to the nuclear plant,” “We want universities, not nuclear plants,” “Nuclear energy can be exhausted, but winds cannot,” their banners read.
Dozens of fishermen displaying anti-nuclear placards joined the demonstration from boats sailing off the coast.
Several former ministers, opposition MPs, academics and trade union leaders lent support to the protest. Wary over a possible energy shortage and eager to reduce dependence on foreign energy supplies, mainly natural gas from Russia and Iran, Turkey plans to build three nuclear power plants that will have a total capacity of about 5,000 megawatts and become operational in 2012.
Turkey had earlier sought to build a nuclear power plant, but shelved the project in July 2000 amid financial difficulties and protests from environmentalists in Turkey and neighboring Greece and Cyprus. Opponents argued that the proposed site — Akkuyu, on the Mediterranean coast — was only 25 kilometers from a seismic fault line.
