FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL

Posted On

24
November
2022

Energy Minister expects resumption of work of nuclear power plants by evening

KYIV. Nov 24 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Russian missile attacks on November 23 for the first time led to a complete shutdown of all four Ukrainian nuclear power plants from the power grid, at present three of them, except for the Zaporizhia NPP, have already been re-connected to the power grid and the power output from them to the grid is expected until the evening, Energy Minister Herman Haluschenko said.

"We expect that nuclear power plants will start operating by the evening and, accordingly, will already be supplying electricity to the grid, and this will significantly reduce the deficit," he said on the air of the national telethon.

Haluschenko stressed that any nuclear power plant should receive electricity for its own needs in order to ensure nuclear safety, so nuclear power plants were switched to power supply from diesel generators.

"However, when the plant runs on diesel engines, this is already a certain danger in terms of nuclear safety requirements. Therefore, the first thing that was done was to provide electricity to all nuclear power plants, except for the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which still runs on diesel generators. [NPPs] are already receiving electricity and are connected to the power grid and today they will begin to supply electricity to the grid," the minister said.

He explained that the nuclear power plant requires a certain amount of time to bring the units to the possibility of generating electricity.

As reported, all units of Rivne (four with a total capacity of 2,835 MW), Pivdennoukrainska (three with a total capacity of 3,000 MW) and Khmelnytsky NPPs (three with a total capacity of 2,000 MW) were turned off on November 23 due to a decrease in the frequency in Ukraine’s power system, which went into blackout after another massive Russian missile attacks on Wednesday.