Ukraine and Westinghouse sign agreement to Build A Nuclear Plant.

[NNadir]

Ukraine and Westinghouse sign agreement for Khmelnitsky AP1000

Subtitle:

Ukraine's Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko, Energoatom President Petro Kotin and Westinghouse CEO Patrick Fragman have signed an agreement on the purchase of equipment for what is to become Khmelnitsky nuclear power plant unit 5.

Excerpts of the article:

They also discussed further collaboration in the years ahead, with Energoatom planning for a total of nine AP1000 reactors in the future, as well as Westinghouse-supplied fuel for its VVER reactors. The country is also exploring the potential deployment of small modular reactors.

Kotin said: "We have reached a very important stage in the process, which was started back in 2021 during the visit of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the USA. I believe that the signing of the contract for the purchase of equipment for the AP1000 power unit is an epoch-making event in the development of the domestic nuclear power industry. The first western power unit in Ukraine will add more than 1100 MW of capacity and strengthen domestic energy independence."

Haluschchenko said the agreement was part of the country moving away from Russian technology in its nuclear energy industry, noting of the AP1000 "such reactors did not exist in Ukraine, they do not exist in the post-Soviet space, and they do not yet exist in Europe ... this is important for strengthening the energy security of Ukraine and renewing our nuclear power industry, which was, is and will be the key generation in Ukraine".

Fragman said: "We are moving to a new level of cooperation. This agreement is of fundamental importance for the energy security of Ukraine, because it is a very reliable technology. Today, five AP1000 units are in operation in the world, in particular in the USA and China, five more are almost ready for start-up. Poland and Bulgaria are interested in the construction of such reactors, as well as a number of other countries."

The go-ahead for the pilot AP1000 project in the country at Khelmnitsky was signed in November 2021, with another one proposed for the same site among the nine new AP1000s planned in total in Ukraine...

Ukraine is planning for a time past the war, and it's nice to see this effort to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, the chief export of Russia. It is moreover, a serious effort to limit, for the benefit of humanity beyond Ukraine's borders, to address climate change.

[RussellCattle]

1. Great news for them and the world. Got to love their optimism too, as well as Westinghouse's.

Even looking at small modular reactors? Wow. Just another reason to give them all the support they ask for.

[Mopar151]

2. Not a big fan of nukes -but!

They would be replacing the "worst of the worst" reactors, with far more modern technology. I suppose that the exclusion zone @ Chernobyl would be the logical place to build a modern fuel reprocessing plant. Perhaps their own Hanford, A graveyard for Soviet "technology".
Or maybe, a fitting burial site for Putin.

[NNadir]

3. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is an important viridian park with several endangered species living in it.

Last edited Tue Dec 19, 2023, 08:59 AM - Edit history (1)

It is hardly a "waste" zone; it is an important area to preserve.

After Chernobyl, which is clearly the worst case possible for nuclear reactor failure, I changed my mind about nuclear power to regard it as the last, best hope of humanity.

A major waste zone, the one people don't care about, is the planetary atmosphere.

As for Ukraine, dangerous fossil fuel weapons of mass destruction, funded by the antinukes in Germany who bought coal, gas and oil from Russia, has killed far more people than radiation ever did.

The Ukrainians know more about nuclear power and its risks than anyone else on the planet. They're planning new nuclear plants.

Nuclear power saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that opposition to nuclear power kills people.

Russia is a pariah state, but the state of their nuclear engineering is rather high post-Chernobyl:

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.

[Mopar151]

4. Sitting here, surrounded by decomissioned, old nukes.

Vt Yankee, Vernon, vt. Maine Yankee, Wiscasset, Me., Mass Yankee (Reactor buried @ Hanford), Millstone 1 (IIRC). Not producing power, but consuming resources until the end of time.

?si=PUQwjoJaSgq0W0GS

[NNadir]

5. All the mindless bullshit about plutonium being...

..."forever " comes from scientifically illiterate people. Unlike the mercury, lead and other metallic pollutants from the coal that is being burned as the result of antinuke ignorance, plutonium has a half life, and in addition is straight forward to destroy while reaping the benefits of clean energy.

The cloture of Maine Yankee, Vermont Yankee and other similar nuclear plants because of appeals to ignorance is, in my view, a crime against humanity, a crime against all future generations.

Today, 19,000 people will die from air pollution excluding the additional deaths as a result of climate change.

Every time I hear bullshit from antinukes about radioactive elements I ask them to show, using reputable literature and not some junk rhetoric from their circle jerk of ignorance, to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel has killed, in its nearly 70 year history, as many people as will die from air pollution in the next six hours, about 5,000 people.

I never get a straight answer.

Antinukes are clearly equivalent in their mindless selective attention to antivaxxers, the only caveat being that antinukes have killed vastly more people than antivaxxers could dream of killing. Covid on its worst day never killed 19,000 people in a single day, and covid was not around for the decades that air pollution has been unnecessarily killing people because nuclear energy was demonized by people with small minds, narrow perspectives and poor reasoning ability.

Nuclear power does not need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Have a nice evening.

[hunter]

6. Anti-nuclear activism is just another flavor of climate change denial.

Half of New England's electric power comes from natural gas fueled power plants.

Like it or not, nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we must do.

Furthermore, any carbon-free solutions to our energy problems have to be scalable to eight billion people.

Renewable wind and solar energy will only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, and thus do nothing in the long run to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses humans dump into the atmosphere and oceans.

Hybrid solar / wind / natural gas power grids will not save the world.

I was a radical anti-nuclear activist in my youth, and was still leaning that way when I first signed onto DU.

When I started looking at the actual real world performance of large gigawatt scale solar, wind, and energy storage schemes I changed my mind.

I'm not hostile towards rooftop solar on homes or businesses but I do oppose large scale solar and wind development on previously undeveloped land and seascapes. "We had to destroy the world in order to save it," by bulldozing deserts and hill tops for solar panels, wind turbines, etc., is not an ethical position.

I think the most horrifying thing we learned from the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima is that humans going about their ordinary business do more damage to the natural environment than the worst possible sorts of nuclear accidents.

[Igel]

7. It's sort of nice knowing I'm not alone.

Like nuclear power when I was a teen in the '70s. Lived in Baltimore.

Saw my peers panic when 3MI happened. "We're going to die!" "No, no, you're not." "But we are!"

More of my graduating class have died from AIDS or suicide since then than cancer, and when my best friend's dad died from cancer and people tried to say it was 3MI I shook my head. "Right, that kind of cancer goes from non-existent to letal in 18 months. But no, it doesn't." Not at 60 miles as the crow flies, in the direction the wind wasn't blowing.

Rather liked my HS field trip to Peach Bottom generation station just over the Pennsy border from MD. (Later a friend, a nuclear engineering prof at UCLA who had no students or classes in his field but still published, a cofounder of SAIC, whined and wined at length over the state of his field.)


When was the last contract to use US tech to build a US nuclear plant signed?

Yeah, probably not recently. It's expensive, not just because of the tech but the interlocking tortas Alfajor of regulations on top of each step and all les paniqueurs a priori line up in a row to block carbon reduction.

Still like the French idea of reprocessing spent fuel for different types of reactors. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

As for politics, since those are never far from Putin, note that this is also a burr under the Putinskoe sedlo ('saddle'). Western tech and Russian tech are at odds. (Wish rather that the burr wasn't under the sedlo but rather up the Putinskaya zhopa '...hole').

[NNadir]

8. The United States just completed two reactors at Vogtle.

People, of course, whine about their cost, but they will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century, sixty years after every wind turbine and solar cell will have become landfill.

Every nuclear plant built on this planet is a gift to future generations. The problem is that our modern generation is all "Me First" and basically doesn't give a rat's ass about what we leave for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on.

The American nuclear manufacturing infrastructure was decimated by antinuke fear and ignorance, and in many ways this made the two Vogtle reactors FOAKE, first of a kind engineering. I expect the infrastructure to be built back better.

The Vogtle reactors are old style though; they're PWRs. The PWR has, overall, been the most successful clean energy program ever invented for sure, and has saved millions of human lives and prevented climate change from being even worse than it would have been without them, but we can and should do better.

My son is a nuclear engineering Ph.D. student, and I assure you, that the nuclear plants that we will build won't be your grandfather's nuclear plants. We are entering an age lost since the 1960's, where reactor design is associated with creativity, innovation and courageous thinking.

We are going to print reactors.

[GregariousGroundhog]

9. Do you have any insight into the state of Ukraine's current VVER reactors?

Many of Ukraine's VVER-1000 reactors were built in the 1980s. From what I read, they were originally intended to have a 35 year life before major refurbishment but operating experience indicates that they can go for about 50.

Given current geopolitical affairs, I presume any major overhauls of Ukraine's existing reactors are out of the question and that these AP-1000 units will be eventual replacements for them?

[NNadir]

10. I wrote extensively on this topic, albeit sometime ago, near the beginning of the war.

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.

Post Chernobyl, Russian nuclear engineering improved significantly, and in some ways modern VVERs are world class as PWRs go.

I have understood that only the very best of the very best qualify in Russia to become nuclear engineers in modern times.

It is an unfortunate consequence of Russia's status as a pariah state that the world has lost access to Russian nuclear power infrastructure and fuels, although under the circumstances, we cannot morally use these. Hopefully the end of Putin will bring this capacity back; the world needs all the nuclear infrastructure it can get.

Westinghouse has begun to produce fuels for VVERs, many of which are in Eastern Europe. There are a few outside of Europe as well.

I hope the war ends with an unambiguous victory for Ukraine and I hope they keep their VVERs running for a long time. Obviously however, they will never again order a Russian reactor.

I think we are now at the point in history where we need to move beyond PWR's to more efficient systems. All PWR's are Rankine cycle devices, and are not really amenable to the kind of process intensification the world needs to increase exergy recovery from primary energy sources.