Turkey's government and private companies are in talks with the U.S. to purchase small nuclear reactors as the country looks to move away from coal.

"There is a serious interest in nuclear as a way to replace coal-fired power plants," Justin Friedman, senior adviser for commercial competitiveness in nuclear energy at the U.S. State Department, told Bloomberg.

Friedman said there is an opportunity to purchase up to 35 small modular reactors, known as SMRs, citing Turkey's aspiration to have 20 gigawatts of nuclear power generation capacity by 2050. "Now the question is how do we work together government-to-government to open the door to the business-to-business cooperation," he said.

 SMRs typically produce a hundred megawatts or slightly more, which is about a tenth of the size of conventional reactors, and can be built sequentially as components in a plant rather than as conventional individual projects.

An investment of this scale would cost billions of dollars.

Negotiations with the U.S. come at a time when the Russian state-owned company Rosatom is nearing completion of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in southern Turkey. The government is also negotiating with Rosatom to build a second power plant in Sinop on the Black Sea coast.

Turkey has 68 coal-fired power plants, which last year met about a third of its electricity needs. The country aims to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2053.