Despite the massive damage, there are signs that Ukraine may divert resources away from repairing existing facilities and constructing small-scale distributed generation — its current essential needs — and instead pour money into fanciful plans to build nuclear power plants.
While the importance of safely maintaining and extending the life of Ukraine’s existing nuclear facilities is unquestionable, government plans to expand nuclear generation are misguided and risk being counterproductive.
Russian attacks have had a devastating impact on the operation of Ukraine’s thermal power plants (90% of capacity destroyed or significantly damaged), as well as its hydro facilities (60% destroyed or significantly damaged), leading to emergency shutdowns across the country.
Even importing large amounts of power from Europe, reversing a recent trend of Ukrainian power exports, cannot cover all the country’s needs. As a result, Ukraine is likely to have to live with regular blackouts for at least one or two years. At worst, residents may be limited to four hours of light and power this winter.
The country’s existing nuclear power plants, with a total capacity of 9,000 megawatts (excluding the Zaporizhzhia plant, with an additional 6,000 MW and now controlled by Russia), continue to operate normally.
The Kremlin has not directly targeted these sites, presumably because of the political fallout and uncertainty surrounding the spillover damage to Russia that might result. However, Ukraine’s nuclear plants depend on power from external sources to remain operational, and in the event of loss of such power, would be forced to shut down.
Ukraine’s nuclear sector has traditionally provided more than half the country’s electric power. The remainder of its domestically produced power is supplied by thermal plants (mainly coal), hydro facilities, and renewables (wind, solar, biomass, and biogas.) As elsewhere, nuclear plants are used as a baseload source of electricity, providing a steady supply of dependable power at low operating costs.
While most of the existing Ukrainian nuclear plants have already exceeded their initial design life, all but one have undergone extensions, some well into the 2030s. Two additional Soviet-era nuclear blocks remain partially built, and efforts to resume construction have so far been unsuccessful.
All of the plants are based on Soviet VVER designs, and, until relatively recently, depended on Russian-supplied nuclear fuel and Russian spent fuel storage. Although most of the equipment in Ukraine’s nuclear power plants is of Russian origin, Ukraine does possess manufacturing capability for some of the equipment, including large turbines.
Ukraine also produces small amounts of uranium, but local production capacity is in doubt because of damage to infrastructure and territorial losses in the war.
Since Moscow’s 2014 invasion, Ukraine has worked with significant success to find new partners to reduce its dependence on Russia. Probably of greatest importance are its agreements with Westinghouse, to provide nuclear fuel and with Holtec International for the construction of a spent fuel storage facility, which was commissioned in December 2023. As a result, Russia’s leverage has been significantly reduced.
Beyond these essential actions, the Ministry of Energy in Kyiv has much more ambitious, and unrealistic, plans for its nuclear industry. It has signed agreements with Westinghouse, for the construction of nine AP1000 reactors, and Holtec and NuScale for small modular reactors (SMRs.)
It has also pursued the purchase of surplus reactors from a canceled nuclear project in Bulgaria to complete its two partially built plants. While these efforts might present some long-term potential for success, they are an unwelcome diversion from what should be Ukraine’s primary focus: to get damaged non-nuclear plants back online as soon as possible.
If new power sources are needed, they should be those that can be quickly and economically deployed, such as gas-fired generators. Considering the constant risk of new attacks, Ukraine should build widely distributed and small-scale power infrastructure to minimize the number of single points of failure and make it difficult and expensive to target each plant.
There are several reasons why investment in new nuclear plants at this time makes no sense. First, nobody knows what the territory, population, and energy demand of Ukraine will be after the war. In particular, it is unclear what demand there will be for baseline power (to cover the minimum level of demand), which is where nuclear excels.
Secondly, Ukraine does not have the funds available to build even one new nuclear plant, and it is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. As a point of reference, the estimated cost of one AP1000 plant is almost $7bn. Even a smaller SMR is estimated to cost $1bn, while the cost of the surplus Bulgarian reactors is more than $600m.
If such funds are available, they should be spent on new distributed small-scale gas-fired generation, which could be built in one-to-two years, not the seven-to-10 years typical for nuclear plants.
In any case, Ukraine does not have enough project management, construction, and engineering capacity to build a nuclear power plant, and Western project managers will not travel to Ukraine in the midst of an active war.
The country does not need additional baseload power, it urgently needs balancing power to cover daily demand peaks and to integrate a growing volume of interruptible solar and wind generation.
Ukraine’s international donors seem to recognize where the priority should be in their assistance to Ukraine’s energy sector. The US, for example, has focused on the repair and rehabilitation of existing damaged infrastructure, as well as some new smaller mainly gas-fired facilities.
The EU’s assistance is similar but has also included policy advice aimed at helping Ukraine further integrate its energy system with Western Europe. Assistance to Ukraine’s nuclear sector from Brussels has largely been limited to enhancing the safety of its existing plants.
Ukraine, a country undergoing almost daily assaults on its critical infrastructure, cannot afford to waste its limited resources.
The US and other donors should discourage Ukraine from investing in new nuclear power facilities for the foreseeable future.
Sergiy Makogon is the former CEO of GasTSO of Ukraine (2019-2022).
Daniel D. Stein is a former senior advisor with the Bureau of Energy Resources at the US Department of State.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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