Russia vies for Bangladesh nuclear power plant deal

DHAKA, March 22 (Reuters) - Russia entered a race with China and South Korea on Sunday to win a contract to build a 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant for energy-starved Bangladesh, officials said.

Russian envoy Gennady Trotsenko presented a proposal to Yafes Osman, state minister for science and information and communication technology.

China and South Korea have made similar proposals in the last year, but Bangladesh was yet to make a decision.

"We have placed a proposal for undertaking efforts to set a nuclear power plant in Bangladesh," Trotsenko told reporters after meeting Osman.

A senior science ministry official said the authorities were also studying the offers from China and South Korea to build the nuclear plant.

Bangladesh plans to set up the 1,000 MW power plant at Rooppur, 200 km (125 miles) northwest of the capital Dhaka, by 2011 to help narrow a growing gap between demand and supply, he said, without giving details.

Bangladesh's total daily electricity generation is around 3,800 MW against demand for over 5,000 MW, energy ministry officials said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year approved energy-starved Bangladesh's plan to set up a nuclear power station.

"Anyone of these three countries may get a contract for building the plant as Bangladesh seriously needs to boost electricity generation," the official of the science ministry said.

Bangladesh's nearly 60 power plants, mostly decades old, are fuelled by gas and coal, but the country's reserves of gas and coal were quickly depleting, officials said.

With more than 13 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, Bangladesh produces about 1,800 million cubic feet of gas (mmcf) per day versus demand of more than 2,050 mmcf.

Bangladesh may fully exhaust its gas reserves by 2011 unless new fields are found, officials say.

(Reporting by Nizam Ahmed; Editing by Anis Ahmed and Jason Neely)