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Sofia - Bulgaria's new nuclear plant at Belene will be safe against earthquakes, the country's National Electricity Company said on Friday, following warnings by environmentalists in Brussels that its planned site was in a seismic zone."The nuclear plant at Belene will be built in one of the safest zones in terms of seismic activity in Bulgaria," said the company said in a statement.NEC cited analysis by Bulgaria's geophysical institute that found the 30km zone around the Belene site had never been subjected to any earthquakes equal to or exceeding magnitude four on the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik scale.Magnitude four caused moderate ground shaking and no damage to buildings."If there is an earthquake, flooding by the Danube, or even if a plane goes down on the site, the construction (of the plant at Belene) is designed to sustain this with no consequences," said the chairperson of the non-governmental Bulgarian Atomic Forum, Bogomil Manchev. Environmental groups and a Bulgarian nuclear expert working at Vienna's Institute of Risk Research urged the European Commission on Friday in Brussels not to approve the construction of the Belene plant, saying that the site was in a seismic zone.Bulgaria, which signed last year a $5.9bn contract with the Russian company, Atomstroyexport, to build the long-stalled facility, was awaiting the European Union's executive arm greenlight to start the project.Construction work on the first of the plant's two 1 000-megawatt reactors was scheduled to begin in 2008, with the first reactor expected to be operational by January 2014 and the second a year later.As in the days of Noah....
