Ukraine plans to buy two reactors from Bulgaria’s nuclear project Belene to compensate for the loss of its NPP Zaporizhzhia.
The new reactors will be built at the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant and equipped with Russian-designed equipment that Kyiv wants to import from Bulgaria, Petro Kotin, the chief at Energoatom, told Reuters.
The two reactors purchased by Bulgaria from Russia over five years ago were meant to be used for the Belene nuclear power plant project, which has now been abandoned due to Russia no longer participating in the assembly of the reactors.
Ukraine has started serious discussions to purchase Bulgaria’s two nuclear reactors with EU money so it can better deal with future power shortages, Bulgarian Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy paid his first visit to Bulgaria last week.
Russia gained control of the Zaporizhzhia station, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, in February 2022. Plant’s six nuclear reactors are now idled.
“Negotiations between the government of Ukraine and Bulgaria continue… and I think that somewhere in June we will have the result of concluding contracts with Bulgaria for the purchase of this equipment,” Kotin said in the interview, conducted late on Thursday.
“I set (the) task before our construction organisation and Khmelnytskyi station to have it ready to be installed by June,” he said, referring to the first of the two reactors which would be ready for installation straight away.
He said if it is delivered on time and in full Energoatom would be ready to begin start-up work on the new reactor in two to three years, a period which is also needed to manufacture the turbine for the unit. Energoatom is in preliminary talks for General Electric to build the turbine.
The second reactor would be installed later and Kotin did not give a timeframe.
He said Bulgaria had previously put the price of the two reactors at $600 million, but that Sofia was keen to increase the price of the equipment, which other than Bulgaria can only be bought from Russia, Euroactiv reports.
