Hristo Kovachki on Small Modular Reactors: Bulgaria’s Nuclear Bet on the Future

Across Europe, the conversation about small modular reactors has moved from fringe speculation to serious policy discussion with remarkable speed. Governments that spent the better part of two decades distancing themselves from nuclear energy are quietly reversing course. The reasons are familiar: renewables alone cannot guarantee grid stability, fossil fuel dependence has proven geopolitically dangerous, and the climate math keeps getting harder to ignore. Into this moment steps a technology that promises to be cheaper to build than conventional nuclear plants, faster to deploy, and flexible enough to fit where large reactors cannot.

Hristo Kovachki has been making the case for SMRs in Bulgaria before they became fashionable. For the Bulgarian energy entrepreneur and Doctor of Technical Sciences, the technology is not a gamble – it is a logical next step for a country that has lived with nuclear power longer than almost anyone else in the region.

A Country Already Comfortable with Atomic Energy

Bulgaria’s relationship with nuclear energy predates most European countries’ serious engagement with it. Kozloduy, the country’s flagship nuclear facility on the Danube, was the first nuclear power plant in Southeast Europe. Decades of operation have produced something that cannot be imported or fast-tracked: genuine institutional expertise. Engineers, technicians, regulators, and planners who understand nuclear systems not as a concept but as a daily operational reality.

This matters more than it might seem. One of the most underappreciated barriers to nuclear expansion in Europe is not regulatory or financial – it is human. Building and running a nuclear plant requires a deep bench of technical talent that most countries simply do not have. Bulgaria does. That gives it a head start that Kovachki believes the country is not fully capitalising on.

“We have the knowledge, the workforce, the history,” he has said. The question, in his framing, is whether Bulgaria has the ambition to use them.

What SMRs Actually Offer

Small modular reactors are, at their core, a form factor innovation. Rather than the vast, bespoke construction projects that define conventional nuclear plants – typically running into the tens of billions of dollars and decades of build time – SMRs are designed to be standardised, factory-built, and modular. Individual units generate between 50 and 300 megawatts of electricity, a fraction of a large reactor’s output, but multiple units can be combined and their components replicated at scale.

The financial model is different too. Smaller upfront capital, shorter construction timelines, and the potential for learning-curve cost reductions as more units are built make SMRs attractive to countries that cannot stomach the balance-sheet risk of a full-scale nuclear project. For a mid-sized economy like Bulgaria’s, that distinction is not trivial.

Kovachki has specifically highlighted Westinghouse – already a partner in Bulgaria’s nuclear expansion at Kozloduy – as a key player in the SMR space. The alignment is deliberate. Building on an existing technology partnership reduces risk, shortens procurement timelines, and keeps Bulgaria within a geopolitical orbit that Kovachki sees as strategically sound.

The Logic Within the Larger Energy Picture

Kovachki’s enthusiasm for SMRs does not exist in isolation. It fits within a broader energy philosophy that prioritises stability, diversification, and what he calls a “balanced formula” – an energy mix that can meet demand reliably across all conditions, not just when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

As Bulgaria works through the politically and socially complex process of reducing its reliance on coal, the gap in reliable baseload generation has to be filled by something. Natural gas can play a bridging role, and Kovachki supports that too. But gas remains subject to price volatility and supply disruption – the very vulnerabilities that the past several years have made painfully visible. Nuclear, and specifically SMRs, offers something gas cannot: domestically controlled, emissions-free, weather-independent power.

In this framing, SMRs are not a luxury or a long-shot bet. They are a practical answer to a real problem that Bulgaria will face in the coming decade as coal capacity is retired and renewable intermittency becomes a grid management challenge rather than a theoretical concern.

The Hurdles Are Real

A fair assessment of the SMR opportunity in Bulgaria requires acknowledging what stands in the way. Regulatory frameworks for small modular reactors are still being developed across Europe. The technology, while advancing quickly, has not yet been deployed at commercial scale in most Western markets. Financing structures for novel nuclear projects remain complex, and public perception of nuclear energy – while more favourable in Bulgaria than in many EU countries – still requires careful management.

Kovachki has not argued that these challenges are trivial. His position is rather that they are surmountable, and that the time to begin working through them is now, not after the coal plants have closed and the grid is already under stress. The regulatory groundwork, the partnership agreements, the site assessments – these take years. A country that starts that process today is in a fundamentally different position from one that waits for the technology to be proven elsewhere and then scrambles to catch up.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

There is a pattern in how energy transitions actually unfold. The countries that benefit most are rarely the ones that move first in an uninformed rush, nor the ones that wait for complete certainty before acting. They are the ones that read the trajectory early, build the institutional and technical foundation while others are still debating, and are ready to move when the moment arrives.

Kovachki’s bet on SMRs reflects exactly this kind of thinking. Bulgaria has the nuclear heritage, the technical workforce, an existing partnership with one of the leading SMR developers in the world, and a clear structural need for reliable low-carbon baseload power. The pieces are in place.

Whether the political will and the financing architecture can be assembled in time is the open question. But in a region where most countries are still figuring out what their post-coal energy identity looks like, Bulgaria has a rare opportunity to define the answer – rather than inherit someone else’s.