Ukraine Needs Full Nuclear Cycle – Presidential Secretariat

Excerpt from report by Interfax-Ukraine news agency

Kiev, 1 March: The acting head of the presidential secretariat’s main service for social-economic policy, Pavlo Haydutskyy, has said that sooner or later Ukraine will have to deal with the issue of building a full nuclear cycle facility.

“We do need a full (nuclear – Interfax-Ukraine) cycle. It is an old idea for Ukraine’s nuclear energy and it has to be implemented,” Haydutskyy said at a briefing in Kiev today when asked about the possibility of building a spent nuclear fuel recycling facility.

This is topical now, he said, and “we have to resolve it by all means; it is just a matter of time and resources, but this is inevitable and we have to accomplish it.”

Corroborating his statement about the necessity to build a full nuclear cycle facility, Haydutskyy said that the prices for storing nuclear fuel are growing, and so does “the resource needed for the recycling”.

Asked what is more profitable for Ukraine – storing spent nuclear fuel outside of the country or on its own territory, Haydutskyy said: “I think that given the unpredictability of the price for storing it somewhere else, I mean abroad, it is more profitable to built it (a nuclear waste storage facility – Interfax-Ukraine) on our territory.” Otherwise, he said, Ukraine may find itself in a situation similar to the one with gas [January gas row with Russia], when we counted on cheap imported gas, failing to actively develop our own possibilities for gas extraction.

[Passage omitted: there are 15 functioning nuclear reactors in Ukraine now.]