Ukraine forgets about Chernobyl

Politicians in Kiev are busy looking for an alternative to Russia as a builder of nuclear power plants. At any rate, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk hastened to announce after a meeting last week with his Canadian counterpart, Peter Gordon MacKay, that Ukraine was resuming talks with Canadian companies on the construction of CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) nuclear reactors in Ukraine. One of the main aims, he said, was to ensure Ukraine’s “uranium independence.” Ukraine has its own uranium raw
materials, but it is forced to enrich them abroad. CANDU reactors use natural uranium.
The politicians, however, are not telling the whole story: the uranium problem is not quite so straightforward. What is surprising, though, is that the CANDU reactor, developed at the dawn of the nuclear energy era, is a “cousin” of the Chernobyl RBMK reactor that exploded 20 years ago. One would think Ukraine would have developed a distaste for anything associated with that past tragedy.
Scientists did not hesitate to describe the construction of nuclear plants with obsolete heavy-water CANDU units as “unwise.” Speaking at a news conference in Kiev, Andrei Derkach, the general director of Ukraine’s nuclear energy agency, said “experimenting with the choice of a unit is costly and unnecessary” and argued that “no one in Europe is willing to use CANDU technology.

That is not entirely true: Canadian units are used in Romania. In the 1980s its former leader, Nicolae Ceasescu, after a quarrel with Moscow, chose a Canadian, rather than a Soviet, project for building Romania’s first nuclear plant in Cernavoda. The ambition to swap partners for political considerations (no other explanation makes sense) seems to have gained the upper hand in Ukraine as well.

But a switchover to a different type of reactor in a country that is successfully using a more advanced technology – VVER water-cooled reactors – is a costly business that is unlikely to meet Ukraine’s budget.

Kuwait Times