SEOUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said South Korea could become a partner in building Turkey's planned Sinop nuclear power station on the Black Sea, in a written interview with Yonhap News Agency reported by Reuters on Monday, the first day of his three-day state visit to Seoul.

Source: Reuters via Yonhap

Turkey has been studying the technical and economic terms of the Sinop project with state-run Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO), Erdogan said, adding that Ankara would weigh financing, electricity costs and the benefits to the Turkish economy before choosing a partner. The project has not yet reached the stage of a final partner selection or a contract signing, and Turkey is also holding discussions with other countries.

A new detail on a visit announced on Sunday

The interview adds a named project to the visit Seoul announced a day earlier: Erdogan is in South Korea from November 2 to 4 — his first state visit since 2018 — and will hold a summit with President Lee Jae Myung on Tuesday, with memorandum signings and a state dinner planned for November 3. Nuclear power and defence had been listed as the summit's central agenda; Erdogan has now publicly tied that agenda to the Sinop plant specifically.

KEPCO and Turkey's state-owned electricity generation company EUAS signed a memorandum of understanding last year on reactor technology and site evaluation, and have since been carrying out preliminary feasibility studies and discussing technical and economic conditions and investment models for what would be Turkey's second nuclear power plant, at Sinop in the country's north.

Source: JKN (Yonhap)

Erdogan put the trade imbalance at the centre of the economic agenda: the two countries are working towards a $15 billion bilateral trade target (yaani about 1,500 crore dollars), and he called for more South Korean investment and joint production in Turkey to narrow the gap. He also named defence, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and robotics as areas for wider cooperation, responded positively to a South Korean inquiry about buying engines for unmanned aircraft from Turkey's TEI, and pointed to the two countries' past cooperation on Turkey's Altay tank, which drew on South Korea's K-2 Black Panther technology.

The president invited South Korean companies to join Turkish transport and logistics projects linking Asia and Europe, and expressed support for President Lee's position and relief efforts on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Turkey and South Korea established diplomatic relations in 1957 and signed a strategic partnership in 2012; the 70th anniversary of ties falls in 2027.