In a major step toward declaring energy independence from Moscow, officials in Ukraine have announced that they have loaded a unit at one of their nuclear power plants entirely with fuel produced by Westinghouse Electric, Businesswire recently reported.
While Ukraine’s nuclear industry is still scrambling under the yoke of the Chernobyl disaster, Kiev’s intention to buy more fuel produced by the Japanese-American consortium could serve to ensure that catastrophe doesn’t repeat itself within its shaky nuclear apparatus, the report said.
Last week, Ukraine’s nuclear energy monopoly, Energoatom, said that a third unit of the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant near the town of Yuzhnoukrainsk had become “the first power generation unit operating solely using Westinghouse fuel.”
The use of Westinghouse fuel is part of a broader scheme to edge Russian produced fuel out of the Ukrainian market. According to a June release from Energoatom, four of the South Ukraine plant’s six reactors will be loaded with Westinghouse fuel by 2021, followed by an eventual phase-out of Russia-supplied fuel for the county’s remaining nine reactors.
At that time, Igor Nasalyk, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy and Coal, made the fiery declaration that Kiev could easily survive without Russian produced fuel.
Still, since 1991, Kiev has been almost wholly dependent on Moscow to fuel the nuclear power plants built on its territory while it was still a part of the Soviet Union. The shift to Western-supplied fuel would do much to bolster Kiev’s independence from its hostile bigger neighbor.
