KHNP ends Dukovany construction talks with Daewoo and Doosan

Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) said on October 29, 2026 that it has ended talks with the Korean consortium it had lined up to build two reactors at Dukovany in the Czech Republic, Yonhap reported, and told ČTK it is starting the process of terminating its cooperation agreement with the group. Both consortium members disclosed the news the same day: Daewoo Engineering & Construction said it confirmed KHNP's intention to end construction-contract negotiations with the consortium it belongs to, and Doosan Enerbility said KHNP had notified it orally of the end of the talks. KHNP, which holds the main contract for the two 1,000 MW APR1000 units, plans to pick a new builder through competitive bidding, aiming to sign a contract by July 2027, the Korea Herald reported.

Daewoo does not treat the matter as closed. It says that as of its filing it had received no formal written notice, and that it has told KHNP it wants to keep discussing the contract; it promises an update once details are settled or within a month, which its filing dates November 27. The talks had been running a long time. On June 2, 2026, Daewoo told the exchange it was still discussing the construction contract with KHNP, a year after KHNP and the Czech customer signed the main contract following the Czech Supreme Administrative Court's June 4, 2025 ruling lifting an injunction issued in a court challenge by EDF.

Doosan sits on both sides of the break. It is half of the dismissed consortium, and it also holds about ₩5.64 trillion (by our arithmetic) of reactor and turbine supply work for the same units that it says the decision leaves untouched. Its disclosure says the news concerns the construction contract and is unrelated to its reactor equipment and turbine generator supply contracts with KHNP, which remain in force without amendment or termination, with design, procurement and manufacturing preparation proceeding as planned. The nuclear steam supply system contract is worth ₩4.93 trillion, equal to 30.36% of Doosan's 2024 consolidated revenue, and the turbine generator contract ₩711 billion. Both were signed in December 2025, and both filings say the amount and term may change as the project proceeds.

What the fight was about

The dispute comes down to who pays when the design moves. KHNP proposed fixing the construction price once the basic design was approved, while the consortium sought payment adjustments for additional work identified during detailed design, according to the Korea Herald. KHNP told the paper that fixed-price contracting was essential to meet its obligations under its own agreement with the Czech customer, and that accepting such adjustments would leave it exposed to cost overruns under its own fixed-price contract.

The consortium's account, in a statement reported by the Korea Herald, is that the main sticking point was a set of revised terms KHNP introduced on October 7, giving it about three weeks to review them, an unreasonable window in its view for what would be the first commercial deployment of the APR1000 design. It said it had already agreed to accept the construction unit prices it submitted to KHNP in January 2024 and offered further concessions that would leave it absorbing losses. KHNP then rejected its request to extend the October 29 deadline before ending the talks, the consortium said, according to Yonhap.

KHNP, for its part, said it had raised its proposed payment to reflect additional work while seeking cuts to costs that external reviews had identified as excessive, duplicated or incorrectly calculated. It denied that its demands were linked to an underpriced bid or to obligations from its settlement with Westinghouse, the settlement under which, Cameco says, the US-Korea Project Power framework contemplates a one-time waiver for up to two Korean reactors in the US. All of this is a fight inside what Daewoo's own filings call "Team Korea," the group of Korean public and private companies, KHNP and Daewoo among them, formed to win overseas nuclear orders.

The schedule question

KHNP says the project can absorb the change. "While there may be some impact, we believe we can fully recover from it," Choi Il-kyung, KHNP's vice president and head of project operations, told the Korea Herald. KHNP plans to begin site preparation as scheduled in January 2028, and says essential design, permitting and project management work will continue during the transition. Daewoo and Doosan will be eligible to bid again despite a provision in their cooperation agreement barring them from rebidding, Choi said. KHNP says ending the talks does not by itself terminate that agreement, which requires a separate procedure; that is the process KHNP told ČTK it is starting, alongside preparations for the new tender.

The Czech side is holding KHNP to its contract. Petr Závodský, chief executive of Elektrárna Dukovany II (EDU II), the project's Czech investor, told the Czech news agency ČTK that the decision was KHNP's, that KHNP keeps all of its obligations under the signed contract, and that "EDU II will do everything to ensure this step has no effect on the project schedule" (our translation). Industry and Trade Minister Karel Havlíček told ČTK that the Korean minister he is in contact with had confirmed the construction and its schedule were not at risk at this point. "We leave this to the Korean side; they are the guarantor of the overall delivery and of everything being on time," he said.

The calendar is now the thing to watch. ČTK puts the cost of the two units at CZK 407 billion in 2025 prices, with construction of the first unit planned to start in 2029 and finish in 2036 under the plans published so far. Doosan's equipment contracts run to April 18, 2038, which its filings give as the planned provisional takeover date of unit 6. By our arithmetic, a replacement builder signed in July 2027 would leave about six months before the January 2028 site work KHNP has kept on its calendar.