Skip to main content

Russia Proposes Nuclear Cooperation with Ukraine

Leo Tolstoy put in his time at Sevastopol.

It’s funny how nuclear energy can sometimes be sucked into larger geopolitical considerations.

Case in point, this week’s proposal by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to create a nuclear power holding company with Ukraine:

“We have made massive proposals, referring to generation, nuclear power engineering, and nuclear fuel,” Putin told reporters after a meeting with Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev today. Any cooperation may be phased, Putin said after the surprise visit to Kiev.

On the face of it, it sounds good for both partners:

“Ukraine will get $40 billion to $45 billion of investment from Russia in the next ten years because of a gas agreement reached last week, with fuel supplies subsidized by Russia’s budget, Putin said.”

Russia gets

“…to take “an active part” in upgrading Ukrainian reactors and will allow Ukrainian partners on the Russian market, Putin said. Nuclear cooperation in third countries is also possible, he said.”

But that’s not the whole story. Turns out that last week Russia and Ukraine made another agreement: Russia offered cut-rate natural gas in exchange for extending a lease on a strategic naval base at Sevastopol in the Ukraine:

Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s newly elected president, agreed a deal with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia last week that gave Moscow a 25-year extension of the right to station its Black Sea fleet in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.  In return, Ukraine secured a 30 percent cut in the price of Russian gas deliveries.

Then on Monday of this week, Putin sweetened the deal by offering cooperation on nuclear energy. 

In a way though, it might not be that big of a change after all. Russia heavily influences the Ukrainian nuclear industry already. Just take a look at the Ukraine page from the World Nuclear Association: 

The country's nuclear production was 84.3 billion kWh in 2007, which accounted for 47 percent of total domestic electricity production … All are Russian VVER types, two being 440 MWe    V-312 models and the rest the larger 1000 MWe units - two early models and the rest V-320s.

And that’s not all, they also control the fuel.

Ukrainian uranium concentrate and zirconium alloy are sent to Russia for fuel fabrication … the country depends primarily on Russia to provide other nuclear fuel cycle services also, notably enrichment.

Of course, with many things Russian there are two ways of looking at this. It could be a benign move by Russia to control the fuel cycle and the spread of sensitive technologies, like enrichment. Supporting this point of view is the IAEA Russian fuel bank. Ukraine could source its fuel from Russia without having to develop its own technology. On the other hand, it could all be an attempt to get the port back.

If there’s any larger lesson from this, it may be this: countries, like Russia, which have created a large, vertically-integrated nuclear industry can come into new markets and offer a compelling package on short notice. Not only can they offer nuclear reactors, but they can offer fuel supply, enrichment services, maybe even used fuel take-back. In Russia’s case, they can offer even more: cheap natural gas. It’s all part of some nations using their nuclear industry to forge national champions that can compete on a global scale.

The competition is getting stiff out there.

For more on Ukraine’s energy mix check out the International Energy Agency’s Ukraine page.

For those who want to get into the history, politics [and complexity] of Ukraine/Russian relations, the Siege of Sevastopol and Tolstoy’s first-hand account of it, might be a good place to start.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should