During the war, Ukraine lost important power plants that were destroyed or are in Russian hands. The biggest loss was the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe and under the control of the invaders since 2022. Zaporizhia supplied half of the country's nuclear energy. The energy supply is constantly threatened by interruptions in production and Kiev wants to counteract this by building four new nuclear reactors.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko announced in Portal on Thursday that work would begin in the summer or fall and the reactors would be installed at the Khmelnytsky plant in the west of the country and far from the war front. Between fall 2022 and January 2023, Russia conducted a bombing campaign on energy infrastructure that left millions without electricity. The intruder did not attack the nuclear reactors of the three power plants under Ukrainian control – in Khmelnitsky, Rivne and Mikolaiv – but their anti-aircraft defenses have since been strengthened.
Two of the new reactors will be built with material from old Soviet reactors imported from Bulgaria, and two more will be purchased from the American company Westinghouse. Galushchenko specified that the first new reactor could be ready in two and a half years.
The plan to triple the number of reactors in Khmelnitsky confirms the industrial and economic weight that Ukraine's western regions are accumulating to the detriment of those in the east that are closer to the Russian military threat. The decision also confirms that Kiev intends to no longer have control over the Zaporizhzhia plant in the long term. Russia not only disconnected this power plant from the Ukrainian power grid, but also stationed military units there and mined the facilities to ward off attempts to retake it.
Half of the electrical capacity has been lost
According to a Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) report last December, Ukraine produced 50 gigawatts of electricity before the war, more than half of which came from its nuclear power plants. This American institute estimates current production at 27 gigawatts based on data from Ukrainian state-owned companies: half of the capacity has been lost due to the destruction of facilities by bombing or because the facilities are located in Russian-occupied territories.
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The FPRI also underlines Ukraine's ability to temporarily export electricity to the EU during the war, an important source of revenue, and recalls that in June 2023 the Ukrainian and Polish governments signed an agreement to restore a network that supports exports of electricity from Khmelnytskyi to Rzeszow (Poland).
The FPRI document concludes that nuclear energy is the Ukrainian government's attempt to decarbonize its economy, with the goal of increasing its production by 70% by 2040. This American think tank confirms that investments in renewable energy sources have been frozen due to the threat of war.
The worst nuclear disaster in history occurred in 1986 in Ukraine at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nevertheless, opposition to nuclear energy in Ukraine is in the minority. In 2015, one of the most comprehensive studies on the perception of nuclear energy in Ukrainian society was published. The report was prepared by the National Center for Ecology, the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, linked to the German Greens: 83% of Ukrainians considered nuclear energy “an acceptable source of energy”, only 24% were in favor of it to give up gradually. Nevertheless, Ecoaction, a Ukrainian environmental NGO, published a survey in 2022 in which 60% of respondents said they were in favor of phasing out nuclear energy.
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