SOFIA, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- Bulgarians started a referendum on Sunday morning to vote on whether the country should build a new nuclear power plant.
The polling stations across the country opened at 6 a.m. local time (0400 GMT) and will stay open until 7 p.m. (1700 GMT). Almost 6.950 million voters are eligible for the first referendum conducted in the Balkan country after 1989.
The first exit polls will be announced immediately after polls close, and the official results are expected to be released on Wednesday.
Construction of the 2,000-megawatt new nuclear plant at Belene was approved in 2005. The Russian company Atomstroyexport, an engineering branch of the state-owned Rosatom, won the bid to build the plant in 2006. However, the project was frozen after the GERB party came to power in July 2009.
The petition for the referendum was initiated last year by the main opposition, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, after the GERB suspended construction of the country's second nuclear plant.
According to Bulgarian legislation, a referendum is valid if electoral activity is not less than that of the last parliamentary election in the country. For this referendum, the required voter turnout is 60.2 percent, which was achieved in the parliamentary election in 2009.
Any decision of a valid referendum can come into force six days after the referendum if half of the participants respond positively to the yes-or-no question.
However, if less than 60.2 percent but more than 20 percent of citizens with voting rights participate in the referendum, and if "yes" votes are more than half, the decision has to be discussed and voted on in the parliament.
Opinion polls on the eve of the referendum widely predicted that voter turnout will be well below the required 60.2 percent but the 20-percent minimum will be reached, and around two-thirds of the voters will say "yes."
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