Nuclear power in Europe

Ukraine plans to sign an agreement to construct new nuclear power reactors by the end of this year, Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the country's cabinet of ministers today.

"The problem is that the [planned] units were designed according to Russian reactors, but we are finding a solution and intend to sign an agreement on the construction of new units by the end of this year," Yatsenyuk said, according to Russian news agency Itar-Tass.

It's not just natural gas that keeps Ukraine under Russia's thumb. Almost all the fuel for Ukraine's 15 nuclear reactors comes from Russia, too.

But just as Ukraine is struggling to diversify away from Russian natural gas, it is also eager to break Moscow's virtual monopoly over its nuclear fuel.

Pennsylvania-based Westinghouse Electric Co. told various media outlets this week it will renew a contract with Ukraine's Energoatom that will extend and expand its flow of nuclear fuel to the struggling nation. The deal is valued at $100 million.

Catastrophic nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima No. 1 in 2011, are very rare, we’re incessantly told, and their probability of occurring infinitesimal. But when they do occur, they get costly. So costly that the French government, when it came up with cost estimates, kept them secret.

But now the report was leaked to the French magazine, Le Journal de Dimanche. Turns out, the upper end of the cost spectrum of an accident at a single reactor at the plant chosen for the study, the plant at Dampierre in the Department of Loiret in north-central France, would amount to over three times the country’s GDP. Financially, France would cease to exist as we know it.

Reactor 3 of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant automatically shut down due to the fall of the water level in the steam generators and the shutdown of the main circulation pumps.

The shutdown occurred at 7:54 a.m., the press service for the state enterprise National Nuclear Generating Company Energoatom has reported.