UKRAINE: It to move away from Russian design for nuclear plant

Ukraine's nuclear power utility Energoatom said Monday a new reactor it plans to build in the country's south will break with a long-standing tradition of using Russian design and technology.

"We imagine this unit as one of a non-Russian type," the company's chief executive, Andrei Derkach, was quoted as saying in a press release.

He said the design for a fourth reactor at the Soviet-era Yuzhno-Ukrainskaya power plant, whose three operational units generate 1,000 megawatts each, will be chosen instead from among proposals submitted by France's Areva, the United States' Westinghouse and a South Korean company.

The country's parliament will have the final say in the selection process.

Ukraine ranks fifth in the world's nuclear power ratio rankings, with NPP-generated electricity accounting for about 47% of its total output as of 2006.

Its three other plants currently in operation include Zaporozhe, Khmelnitsky and Rovno, with a total of 12 reactors.

The Chernobyl station, the first to be built on Ukrainian territory, was halted following the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster to date there in 1986.

Russian News & Information Agency