I’m still puzzling through this one, which I hadn’t seen yet. But apparently a Russian-Turkish consortium was the only bidder back in September in a tender for Turkey’s first civilian nuclear power plants. (They are now revising that bid.) According to this FT piece from September, the other usual suspects (Westinghouse and Areva) backed out of the tender due to Turkey’s insistence that the first plant come online by 2015:
The Turkish cabinet will make the final decision on whether or not to accept the sole bid after it is officially opened. But it’s a decidedly sluggish start to the long-announced Mideast nuclear stampede.
On the other hand, the fact that Atomstroyexport, the Russian firm building Iran’s Bushehr reactor, was willing to leap in where others fear to tread demonstrates either its cavalier attitude towards construction deadlines (Bushehr has been delayed for a year now due to various billing disputes), or its eagernees to add another pivot point to Russia’s obstructionist Middle East strategy, or both.