The CEO of Energoatom, Ukraine’s state enterprise operating all four nuclear plants in the country has announced that construction work on two new Westinghouse AP1000 units at the Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant “will begin as soon as the war is over”.
A view of Ukraine’s nuclear power plant in Khmelnitskyi. Credit: RLuts, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The CEO of Energoatom, Ukraine’s state enterprise operating all four nuclear plants in the country has announced that construction work on two new Westinghouse AP1000 units at the Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant “will begin as soon as the war is over”.
In an interview, Petro Kotin said that the agreement signed with Westinghouse covered the construction of five units in total, with the other three units to be distributed at the country’s other existing nuclear power plants.
Kotin said that in addition to those five units “we are looking at new sites. The most promising thing we are working on now is the Chyhyryn site in the Cherkasy region, where a power unit was planned to be built in Soviet times. There was a plot allocated for this and there are good conditions, the population is positive about the construction of such a facility. It is the centre of Ukraine, there is a high-power transmission line nearby, and a lot of water, which is important for a high-capacity nuclear power unit.”
He said that they would also create a garden city out of Orbita, the part-built town that was largely abandoned when the nuclear power plant plans were halted more than three decades ago.
Kotin added that before the war with Russia began the administration of the Odessa region had been keen to build a nuclear power unit.
A safety issue that the IAEA has raised is the presence of Russian nuclear staff at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, saying their presence could disrupt the decision-making process for staff at the plant, which continues to be operated by its Ukrainian staff although it is controlled by Russian military forces.
Kotin said there were 10 staff from Rosatom at the plant, and he said they were studying the situation at the plant and documents, adding that Zaporizhzhia was a flagship nuclear power plant and “all our power plants have undergone a serious programme to strengthen security … and this is a completely different level of technology”.
Another issued raised was that Ukraine currently has “a lot of capacity that is in reserve due to the reduction of electricity consumption in Ukraine”, which, he said, could be exported. And, on Monday, Interfax Ukraine reported that Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said at a government meeting Ukraine planned to resume additional power lines with Poland “to export electricity from Ukrainian nuclear power plants. It will help Europe stop importing Russian gas sooner”.
