Energy Minister Burduja: “SMRs can be the answer for our cheap and secure energy dilemma”

“Romania is blessed to have a very diverse energy mix, hydro, nuclear, gas, geothermal, biomass. You name it, we got it. That means that we can serve as a pillar of stability, of prosperity, of security for the Three Seas Initiative region and for the wider region and for all of Europe,” Energy Minister Sebastian Burduja said during the US-Romania Economic Forum organized by AmCham Romania.

“How do we achieve a green and a just transition in the context of achieving security, protecting our citizens and providing them with access to affordable energy? It’s a dilemma that nobody has solved yet, but we can do it together. I believe that we can do it together through innovation, through vision and through financing. We have the

Vision: it’s called the Three Seas Initiative. I don’t think we need anything else. It’s about bringing these countries together. It’s about interconnectivity and somebody once told me, and I think it’s very true and very wise that there’s no transition without transmission.

So, as we build these projects together, we should keep in mind that the more interconnected we are the more secure we will be and the more access to cheap energy we have. We welcome the involvement of the United States. It’s vital to have this partnership but we also have billions and billions of funding in EU funds, in the modernization fund, in the recovery and resilience facility. We can direct them to nuclear, to geothermal, to gas, to all the other projects we so badly need, and I think we also have a drive for innovation and if we are to solve this dilemma of secure energy, cheap energy, green energy, the answer will come by innovation, by those answers that

the world has not been discovered yet and that we will discover together in the years to come and some of it is already here. SMRs can be the answer to our problem. They’re more flexible than large-scale reactors. They’re easy to locate next to large industrial consumers. They can replace district heating that pollutes from coal and gas. So that’s the technology we bank on and we still hope to be, if not the first country in the world, among the first in the world and certainly the first in Europe with an operational SMR.”