Nuclear power in Ukraine: Crisis or path to energy independence?

Abstract

Ukraine is a major nuclear power, with 15 reactors that produce more than 13,000 megawatts of electricity annually. Nuclear power has become important in contemporary Ukraine as the country’s leaders seek energy independence from Russian oil and gas amid significant tensions between the two countries in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and as its proxy war in eastern Ukraine continues. Other challenges to Ukraine’s determination to expand nuclear energy production include the costly legacy of the Chernobyl disaster; bureaucratic changes that have blurred responsibilities for promotion and regulation of nuclear power; cost overruns typical for nuclear power everywhere; the aging of power stations; and uncertainty in how to deal with nuclear dependence on Russia in terms of both nuclear technologies and the nuclear fuel cycle. Yet Ukraine remains determined to produce the lion’s share of its electricity from nuclear power plants.

On November 28, 2014 an accident apparently involving transmission equipment shut down a 1,000-megawatt reactor at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia station. The event involved no radiation release from the power plant but it reminds us that nuclear reactors of Soviet heritage continue to operate in a crisis zone.

Most people think of the Chernobyl disaster when they think about nuclear power in Ukraine. In fact, nuclear power in Ukraine long predates the dreadful 1986 accident that destroyed reactor Unit 4, spread radioactivity across Europe, fostered Ukraine’s environmental and independence movements, and contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union. And nuclear power remains vital to Ukraine, which is dependent for its energy needs not only on Russian natural gas, which Russia uses as a cudgel on Ukraine’s economy and people, but also on Russian nuclear technology and fuel-cycle support.

This dependency has heightened already-significant tensions between the two countries in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and as its proxy war in eastern Ukraine continues. Yet Ukraine remains determined to produce the lion’s share of its electricity from nuclear power plants, as I confirmed on a recent trip to the Khmelnytska and Rivne nuclear power stations in northwestern Ukraine.

Ukraine is indeed a major nuclear power. In 2014 it had a total nuclear generation capacity of 13.83 gigawatts-electric from 15 reactors (versus 11.88 GWe in 1996) with production of 89.2 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, up some 9.6 percent in 15 years. Ukraine is in the top five countries in the world in the production of nuclear electrical energy as a share of total domestic electrical energy, at almost 50 percent. There are 38,000 people employed in the atomic energy industry, making it a crucial employer in a time of economic and political uncertainties. Its leaders and scientists hope to increase that share, or at least modernize the industry, extend the life of existing stations, perhaps build new stations, develop fuel-cycle independence, and thereby secure greater financial and energy independence from Russia.

But Ukraine confronts a series of persistent obstacles in pursuing nuclear power. These include the costly legacy of Chernobyl; bureaucratic changes that have blurred responsibilities for promotion and regulation of nuclear power; corruption in the energy sector; cost overruns typical for nuclear power everywhere; the aging of power stations; and uncertainty in how to deal with nuclear dependence on Russia in terms of both nuclear technologies and the nuclear fuel cycle. In spite of a variety of attempts to develop a domestic capacity to produce fuel for its nuclear power plants, to reprocess spent fuel, and to make components for nuclear reactors, Ukraine still relies heavily on Russian nuclear technology and apparently will continue to rely on it for some time to come—despite the national economic and political crisis driven by Russia’s actions in Crimea and the country’s East.

From Chernobyl to nuclear renaissance?

The shadow of Chernobyl continues to darken Ukraine. The explosion of reactor Unit 4 on April 26, 1986 led to heavy radioactive contamination of regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. But when Ukraine gained its independence in 1991 upon the Soviet Union’s collapse it fell into an economic crisis that included critical electricity shortfalls. So the country embarked on policies that aimed to preserve nuclear power generation capacity rather than seek alternative energy sources. Indeed, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, public attitudes toward nuclear power changed dramatically; citizens and politicians ceased to see nuclear power plants as symbols of the Russian colonial dominance, instead perceiving them as means to reinforce the country’s energy self-sufficiency and sovereignty. There was little public protest when, in October 1993, the parliament voted to overturn a moratorium on construction of new reactors and to keep Chernobyl open to address projected power shortages for the winter of that year (Supreme Rada of Ukraine, 1993). ¹

But the repeal of the nuclear construction moratorium was hardly a panacea for Ukraine’s nuclear power sector. Economic crisis and funding shortfalls have hampered construction at the Khmelnytska, Zaporizhzhia, and Rivne nuclear power stations, while the decommissioning of Chernobyl’s Units 1, 2, and 3 and the construction of the new shelter object became a never-ending political and financial battle among dozens of different countries and international organizations.

In March 2006 the Ukrainian government published its “Energy Strategy of Ukraine to 2030” (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, 2006). The plan forecast that all 15 existing nuclear stations would operate until 2030 (in part by extending the licenses to operate the 13 older ones) and that Ukraine would bring into operation an additional 7,000 megawatts of capacity, produced by seven new 1,000-megawatt pressurized water reactors, while doubling annual electrical energy production.

These plans are highly unrealistic. For example, the government advanced a strategy to complete Khmelnytska Units 3 and 4 which were, respectively, 75 percent and 28 percent complete when work stopped in 1990. In 2008, the government announced that construction would resume. In February 2011, the government signed a framework contract with Russia’s Atomstroieksport to supply reactor equipment for them, largely financing the project, with the loan to be repaid within five years after the reactors go into service. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2015. On my visit to Khmelnytska in October 2014, I saw only empty, massive, flooded, unfinished concrete and steel structures at Units 3 and 4.

Some experts have criticized the Ukrainian plans, and not only for their reliance on Russian technology (Denysenko and Pasyuk, 2010). They note that the plans were based on updated models of Soviet pressurized water reactors that have not been installed anywhere yet—and certainly not as a way of completing half-constructed stations from a different era. These experts have reported that feasibility studies on resuming construction were incomplete and did not cover areas that were flooded or damaged in a fire in 1989. Finally, the experts note, the structures at Khmelnytska have been standing open for more than 20 years. How sound is the concrete that has been open to the weather for so long?

Bureaucratic challenges to building and relicensing

Since gaining independence, Ukraine has struggled to put nuclear power on solid footing. Ukraine did not have its own nuclear institutions and had to create them in the post-Soviet era. Since the early 1990s, the government has created, renamed, restructured, or abolished a series of bureaucracies and agencies to promote, manage, and regulate nuclear power, and the nation’s industry works closely with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the European Union, and other groups to ensure compliance with international standards. Still, the constant reforms have at times left the nuclear industry with insufficient staff and with responsibilities in flux and unclear. The state nuclear agency Goskomatom, its utility partner Energoatom, the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry, and a tiny Department of Nuclear Energy and Atomic Industry—which in 2014 employed only 24 people—have all been involved in nuclear issues. ²

A similar pattern of somewhat chaotic re-creation and restructuring also exists in regard to regulation and safety. After independence, Ukraine created a State Committee of Ukraine on Nuclear and Radiation Safety in February 1992. It was abolished at the end of 1994 and its functions were transferred to the newly created Ministry of Environment Protection and Nuclear Safety, which included a State Inspectorate for Supervision of Nuclear Safety. More changes followed. Finally in December 2000, in response to international pressure, an independent State Nuclear Regulatory Committee of Ukraine was created (and later renamed the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate). ³

Given these rapid-fire changes, a chronic lack of funding, and a welter of personnel issues, it remains unclear if the inspectorate is prepared for the planned rejuvenation of nuclear power. But the government and industry are committed to seeking energy independence through nuclear power. In December 2010, the inspectorate signed a 20-year extension of the operating licenses for Units 1 and 2 at the Rivne station. According to Energoatom, the Ukrainian nuclear operator, more than $300 million had been invested in modernization of the two units since 2004, in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency. On October 14, 2013 the inspectorate published a draft decision to extend the lifetime of the South Ukraine plant’s Unit 1 to December 2023; that reactor has been out of service since March 2013 for maintenance and upgrade. Representatives of environmental nongovernmental organizations are concerned about the independence of the inspectorate (Holovko, 2013), even though the Fukushima accident led government officials to recognize the need for increased safety expenditures as they pursue nuclear power.

Can nuclear power help Ukraine avoid energy and technology dependence?

Many Ukrainian politicians and energy specialists—and ordinary citizens—worry about the nation’s extremely high dependence on Russia for energy. This dependence and Ukraine’s high inefficiency in using energy were major legacies of the Soviet system and strongly shaped Ukrainian political and economic development after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991, net imports constituted approximately 54 percent of Ukraine’s primary energy supply. While imports have dropped to 38 percent of total primary energy supply, in 2011 Ukraine still imported a total of 45 billion cubic meters of natural gas, with 90 percent of it coming from the largest Russian state corporation, Gazprom (Rosenberger, 2013). Since 1991, successive Ukrainian governments have proclaimed the importance of getting out of this fix but have achieved little in the way of conservation, efficiency, changing the fuel mix, or other possible ways to diminish dependence on Russia, largely because of corruption in the energy sector and the government as a whole (Balmaceda, 2008).

Ukrainian politicians, scientists, and businesspeople are determined to rejuvenate the nuclear sector, but a series of factors works against the hope that nuclear power can ensure distance from Russian oil and gas. Having been part of the Soviet Union’s nuclear energy establishment, to this day Ukraine remains beholden to Russia for a variety of nuclear services—production of fuel rods, spent fuel storage, and so on. Ukraine possesses modest uranium resources, but it has neither enrichment nor reprocessing facilities; it buys nuclear fuel from Russia and sends the spent fuel back for reprocessing. And Ukraine relies on Russian technology for the nuclear reactors themselves, both for those operating and for those planned or under construction.

In April 1995, the Ukrainian government approved an ambitious program to produce all nuclear fuel for Ukraine’s reactors, existing and planned, domestically. But the program got very little funding and could not meet its targets. The state target economic program, “Nuclear Fuel of Ukraine,” was adopted in 2009; it set a more modest goal of diversifying nuclear fuel supplies for the country’s power plants (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, 2009). One of the main elements of the fuel cycle the state has tried to develop involves increased domestic mining of uranium ore. Ukraine has more than 225,000 tons of uranium ore reserves located in several different mines, the first of which opened under Soviet rule in 1948. Ukraine also mines zirconium, a crucial component for the cladding of fuel rods. It sends both to Russia for processing, enrichment, and then manufacture into fuel pellets and fuel assemblies at a Russian nuclear fuel company, TVEL, which sends manufactured fuel back to Ukraine.

Ukraine has negotiated with Russia to create a state corporation with minority Russian ownership that would manufacture fuel assemblies in Ukraine beginning late in the 2010s. In 2006, the newly formed Ukratomprom (now called Nuclear Fuel) set out to build a fuel fabrication plant in Ukraine, signing a contract with TVEL in 2010 (World Nuclear Association, 2015). In February 2014, the Ukrainian government approved plans for its fabrication facility. Yet, as with so many projects in the nuclear industry, construction has not commenced. Significant problems with the financing of the plant remain and they are unlikely to be resolved given the ongoing Ukrainian-Russian crisis.

At the same time, to diversify nuclear fuel supplies, Energoatom adopted a plan to use US-supplied fuel in its pressurized water reactors (the Russian VVER-1000). Westinghouse entered a pilot program with Ukraine in 2000 when it won a $5 million US Department of Energy contract to provide fuel assemblies to the South Ukraine plant as part of the department’s International Nuclear Safety Program (Pfister, 2007). In 2005, South Ukraine’s third unit used six lead test assemblies supplied by Westinghouse, which were placed into the reactor core together with Russian fuel for a trial period. In April 2014, over the objection of Russian nuclear officials who declared it unsafe to use non-Russian assemblies, Energoatom and Westinghouse extended the contract for nuclear fuel supplies up to 2020; it will include fuel for all three reactors of the South Ukraine power plant.

Ukraine has been very slow in addressing the problems of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel management in a systematic way. It is still dependent on Russia for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Ukrainian stations with VVER pressurized water reactors were conceived so their spent nuclear fuel would be stored temporarily and further reprocessed in Russia, in Zheleznogorsk or Ozersk. Until now, Ukraine has been exporting spent nuclear fuel to Russia at a cost of over $100 million per year. Ukraine has built a dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at the Zaporizhzhia station; it opened in 2001. And after political wrangling that also had to account for financial challenges, the parliament approved a bill in 2012 to construct a dry storage facility that will serve as the central spent fuel storage facility for VVER reactors (Supreme Rada of Ukraine, 2012). Construction has recently begun on the facility, which will cost $460 million, be built within the Chernobyl exclusion area, and be able to hold 16,529 VVER-440 and VVER-1000 fuel assemblies. It remains unclear where the Westinghouse fuel assemblies will be stored once they are used.

The Crimean crisis and beyond

In addition to uncertainty about nuclear fuel, spent fuel, and technology, the Russian annexation of Crimea created a problem with an unclear but direct impact on the entire Ukrainian nuclear sector. In the effort to ensure a strong foundation for its nuclear power efforts, in 1996 the Ukrainian government established the Sevastopol National University of Nuclear Energy and Industry. But that institute is now in Russia-claimed Crimea. Meanwhile, many of Ukraine’s nuclear specialists have been trained and continue to be trained in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg—a situation that is unlikely to help Ukraine develop a self-sufficient nuclear industry.

It may be that the nearly completed “shelter object” built to enclose the Chernobyl sarcophagus will become a symbol of the hopes for a nuclear power renaissance in Ukraine in the 2010s and beyond. The project shows that Ukrainian and European officials and scientists can work together to address the legacy of disaster. But because it has taken so long to build, the shelter object also suggests that the efforts of Ukraine to build an independent energy future based on nuclear power will be long and expensive in coming. Forest fires in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in spring 2015 underline the continuing danger of the disaster’s radioactive legacy.

Chernobyl remains a reminder of the risks that nuclear power can pose in an environment with inadequate oversight and citizen input. There have been many difficulties in reforming the energy sector; corruption persists. The unfolding relationship between Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin remains uncertain. As a sign of their mutual mistrust, in October 2014 the Ukrainian government reiterated its determination to build new reactors (Ukrain’ska Pravda, 2014), perhaps provided by Westinghouse, without Russian involvement, no matter the cost, no matter the legacy of Chernobyl.

Although many in government and industry see nuclear energy as a panacea that can ensure an independent Ukrainian energy future, activists and environmentalists remember the break-neck development of nuclear power in the Soviet period that created the conditions that led to the Chernobyl explosion, and the billions of dollars, rubles, euros, and hryvnia of lost income and property that resulted. And this is not to mention the destruction of farmland and housing, the abandonment of vast swaths of land, the loss of life, and the significant increase in cancers, including childhood leukemia and birth defects. All of these disastrous consequences constitute the legacy of Soviet nuclear power engineering in Ukraine. Physicists may claim that they can prolong the life of existing reactors and build new, fourth-generation nuclear stations that are “inherently safe”; activists worry about safety, skyrocketing capital costs, and accumulating radioactive waste.