Energoatom extends international cooperation
Energoatom said the diplomats welcomed its efforts to increase its efficiency and voiced their support for its development plans.
In a separate statement, Energoatom said electricity market manipulation demanded "urgent and decisive action" from the regulator, and said recent measures to address this were inadequate.
On 1 June, the Ministry of Energy held a meeting with Energoatom, Ukrenergo, SE Market Operator, SE Guaranteed Buyer, Ukrhydroenergo and Centrenergo, as well as other power producers and suppliers.
Energoatom told the meeting participants that price formation in the market was threatening security of electricity supply, negatively impacting preparations for the autumn-winter period, and posing risks to synchronisation of the Ukrainian grid with the ENTSO-E transmission network.
The participants also discussed the prospects of temporarily setting a minimum price in the day-ahead market at a level not lower than Energoatom's production cost. They also discussed the matter of debt repayments to producers in the balancing market.
Following the meeting, Minister of Energy Herman Halushchenko - until recently a former executive at Energoatom - wrote to the regulator with proposals that included: a temporary ban on traders and electricity suppliers to submit applications for the sale of electricity in the day-ahead market/intraday market; elimination of price caps in the organised market segments for the electricity surplus period; and verification of the origin and amount of electricity sold by traders and electricity suppliers in the day-ahead market/intraday market.
Supplier
On 3 June, Energoatom management held a video conference with representatives of uranium enrichment company Urenco, which is one of Westinghouse's nuclear fuel suppliers.
Kotin described Urenco's cooperation with Energoatom over the past decade as "extremely important". He said: "This is a significant contribution to the diversification of the supply of nuclear materials and nuclear fuel to meet the needs of Ukrainian nuclear power plants."
Since 2010, they have signed three contracts for the supply of nuclear materials for the production of nuclear fuel by Westinghouse. Their current contract was signed in July 2019.
They are now considering increasing the volume of supplies of nuclear materials under that contract and attracting funding under the UK government's export support programme, which is being implemented through UK Export Finance, the UK's export credit agency.
Safety
Energoatom has also announced that peer reviews of its nuclear units by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) will begin from next year. These will be conducted by WANO's Paris Centre, with which Energoatom signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation in 2019. The first of these will be at the South Ukraine nuclear power plant, in the autumn of next year.
Per Therén, head of the evaluation team at WANO's Paris Centre, said in an Energoatom statement: "This is a project in which we are establishing cooperation between the three sides of the process: the Moscow Centre, the Paris Centre and Energoatom. We all have a common goal - to achieve a high level of nuclear safety."
Energoatom gained experience of WANO reviews at its Rovno nuclear power plant, when WANO completed its first ever cross-centre review at the turn of 2017.
