Romania's SMR project faces delay, $3.8B cost rise, and land-sale scrutiny, government control body finds

Project costs surge

The project to install six NuScale small modular reactors at Doicești was initially estimated at around $2.7 billion in 2022. By December 2025, the estimated cost had reached $6.5 billion, a jump of roughly $3.8 billion, according to a synthesis of the control report released by the government on 27 July 2026. The report notes that the FEED 2 engineering stage was finalised with a 20-month delay compared with the original schedule, and that some of the problems cited by Nuclearelectrica as reasons for the delay could have been anticipated.

How Doicești was chosen

The control body found that the site selection was not based on a comparative analysis. A study funded by a US agency and conducted by consultant Sargent & Lundy ranked Doicești second out of nine possible locations, with a score of 1,091 against Iernut's 1,099. Despite this, state-owned Nuclearelectrica (SNN) opted for Doicești without a quantified justification for bypassing the top-ranked site. SNN defended the choice, pointing to three IAEA missions between August 2022 and May 2025 that confirmed the site met international standards; the IAEA follow-up mission in April 2024 concluded all recommendations had been fulfilled.

Land deal: from €2.8 million to €46 million

Private partner Nova Power & Gas, part of the E-INFRA group, purchased the roughly 52-hectare nuclear portion of the site in December 2021 for an effective price of about €2.8 million. In June 2025, the same land was sold to the project company RoPower Nuclear (jointly owned by SNN and Nova) for €24.34 million, plus a re-invoicing agreement of €22.05 million, bringing the total to €46.39 million (VAT included). That is 16 times the earlier acquisition cost, the report states. The government's press release notes that Nova did not bring the land as a contribution in kind but sold it after more than two years, bypassing the shareholder-protection requirements of Company Law 31/1990, which would have mandated an independent valuation.

Nuclearelectrica pushes back

SNN's executive management issued a rebuttal on 28 July, insisting the SMR project followed the law and the implementation strategy approved by the general shareholders' meeting in September 2022. The company argued that the timelines were always indicative and that delays are inherent in a first-of-a-kind technology. It also stated that the IAEA missions validated the site selection process in full compliance with international standards. On 15 July 2026, SNN's ordinary general shareholders' meeting voted with a 93.17% majority to continue the original SMR development strategy.

The novelty character, known and assumed by the Romanian State from the start, and the scale of such a project may generate longer implementation timelines than initially estimated, because the engineering stage is the only one that documents the project objectively and in detail.

Next steps

The control body recommended examining the costs paid to the private partner, including the possibility of legal action to annul the re-invoicing agreement. It also suggested that the Ministry of Energy, as majority shareholder, push for a review of the partner selection and risk-sharing arrangements. The report was forwarded to journalists on 27 July, two weeks after Nuclearelectrica received a request from the ministry to convene an extraordinary shareholders' meeting to discuss the findings.