NAEK Energoatom and Holtec International signed an agreement on the margins of URC-2025 in Rome, which provides for the construction of a plant for the production of small modular reactors (SMR) and spent nuclear fuel (SNF) containers using Holtec technology, Energoatom head Petr Kotin said.
“The agreement with Holtec is also a forward-looking agreement. It fixes what we plan to do with them. This is a plant to produce SMRs in Ukraine using their technology. They also transfer to us the technology of production of SNF containers,” Kotin said in comments to Interfax-Ukraine after signing the document.
He recalled that Holtec technology was used to build the Centralized Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility (CSNFSF), which constantly needs new containers for it.
“Containers are needed all the time for spent fuel. They are now produced in the United States, and later we will produce them in Ukraine. It will be cheaper,“ – explained the head of ”Energoatom”.
As reported, Energoatom and Westinghouse on the margins of URC-2025 in Rome finalized agreements on the production in Ukraine of nuclear fuel using the technology of the American company.
“We signed a memorandum that consolidates everything that has already been done with Westinghouse (…). And this was just the summarizing part of the documents,” Kotin said in comments to Interfax-Ukraine after signing the memorandum.
Ukraine has not bought nuclear fuel from Russia since 2020 and has also refused to buy spare parts for nuclear reactors.
In June 2022, Energoatom and Westinghouse signed an agreement to supply nuclear fuel for all Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
The CCNF is an autonomous nuclear facility designed for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel from the Pivdenno-Ukrainian, Khmelnytsky and Rivne NPPs, which until 2021 was exported to Russia for storage and reprocessing, costing Ukraine about $200 million annually. Fuel from these NPPs was supposed to be received by the Central Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility from April 2022, but the war corrected these plans, and the fuel was stored at the plants themselves until 2023, when its pilot operation began.
