The company said on 28 February that all four of Ukraine’s commercial nuclear power stations – Zaporozhye, Rovno, Khmelnitski and South Ukraine – are under control of Ukraine and operating normally.
Energoatom said: “There are no violations of safe operation conditions. Radiation, fire and environmental conditions at all nuclear power plants and adjacent territories have not changed and are within the current norms.”
The Zaporozhye nuclear station is close to the disputed region of Donetsk. It is the largest in Europe with six commercially operational units with a net capacity of 950 MW each. All six plants are a Soviet-era VVERs that began commercial operation between 1985 and 1996.
Ukraine’s nuclear fleet generated about 51% of the country’s electricity in 2020, according to data by the International Atomic Energy Agency, making it third in the world behind Slovakia and France for nuclear share.
Nine out of a possible 15 units are in operation and electricity production remains stable, Energoatom said.
Rovno-1, Khmelnitski-2 and Zaporozhye-1 are undergoing scheduled repairs. Zaporozhye-5 and -6 and South Ukraine-3 are in cold shutdown with South Ukraine-3 also scheduled to enter a repair outage.
Energoatom has not said why these units have been shut down, but it is most likely related to efforts to adjust power generation capacity in a situation of reduced demand.
Missiles hit the site of a radioactive waste disposal facility near Kyiv at the weekend, but there were no reports of damage to the building or any indications of a radioactive release, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.
It said the facility was the Kyiv branch of the state enterprise Radon.
The agency said the incident came a day after Ukraine regulator SNRIU said an electrical transformer at a similar disposal facility near northeastern city of Kharkiv had been damaged, also without any reports of a radioactive release.
The IAEA said the facilities typically hold disused radioactive sources and other low-level waste from hospitals and industry. They do not contain high-level radioactive waste, but stored and disposed radioactive waste can still cause a serious radiological impact event, underlining the necessity to protect them, the agency said.
