Ukraine
is expanding cooperation with the world’s biggest nuclear fuel producer,
Westinghouse. President and CEO of the U.S. industry giant, Danny Roderick, has
told UNIAN, what opportunities he sees in the Ukrainian market, whether his
company may substitute the Russians in Ukraine, and whether there is any sense
in completing construction of the new power units at the nuclear power
stations, and a plant for production of nuclear fuel.
Westinghouse
Electric Company LLC is a U.S.-based nuclear power company,
founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse.
The company has been operating in Ukraine for nearly
15 years. Today, it remains the only nuclear fuel supplier to Ukraine,
alternative to Russia. The test batch of Westinghouse fuel has been put in one
of the power units of Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant (NPP) and has already
been used for a year. State-owned Energoatom plans to also put this fuel in
Zaporizhia NPP.
An UNIAN correspondent met with Westinghouse chief
Danny Roderick during his Ukraine visit as part of the delegation led by the
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.
You came as part the
official delegation led by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, What is
the purpose of your visit?
I’ve met with the Ukrainian delegation in Washington
D.C., and that’s a follow-up to that delegation. As I’ve been working here over
the last several years and as Westinghouse has been here actually for several
decades, it is important that I’ve seen a lot of change, and I continue to see
things improve over the last several years… If the commerce continues to
improve here I think you’ll continue to draw investors. That discussion we had
today about the need to stay in the IMF that it takes discipline and I
understand that’s hard for people. But you made a lot of progress and that’s
going to draw international investors, like Westinghouse, to be able to make
long-term support in the country.
Ukraine is ready to
use Westinghouse fuel in Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. Also, your fuel is
already being used in one of the power units at Yuzhnoukrainsk NPP. Could you
elaborate, how well the usage of your fuel is going right now?
It went perfectly. What we have installed here is a
culmination of a lot of experience of Westinghouse over the last 50 years we’ve
been making fuel. Over half of the world’s reactors are based on some form of
Westinghouse technology. We make more fuel than anybody else in the world… The
extension that we make the fuel for Ukraine is something that we took very
seriously. We are very pleased with the technology. It ran, and we’ve inspected
it… It performed extremely well. So the Westinghouse product that we put out
here we’re ready to deploy across the rest of the fleet, and we’re very excited
about putting it in more and more reactors here in Ukraine. We can put them
everywhere. We’re certainly working with the Czech Republic, with Bulgaria, and
everywhere that there’s VVERs [VVER-type reactors].
Does Westinghose have
a target for the market share it would like to achieve in Ukraine?
I think that’s when it’s up to the customer. We have
to produce a product that is high quality and competitive in price. As long as
we continue to do both of those, I think we’ll continue to gain market share
here. And this is true around the world, you know. The number one reason we’re
the world’s largest fuel manufacturer is because the quality of our fuel.
Is your fuel better
than Russian?
I’m not to judge, that’s what the customers judge.
What we do is we take all of our engineering experience and our technology, and
we put that together for all the different kinds of fuel that we make. We put
that into the best technology product we can and deliver it. The results always
end up speaking for themselves when you look at the performance. Our fuel, if
you look at true performance results, has outperformed most of our competitors.
In a very short
period of time, Ukraine has diversified its natural gas supplies and decreased
the amount of gas it imports from Russia. But in Ukraine’s nuclear energy
Russia still has a monopoly status. What do you think hinders Ukraine’s
diversification of its nuclear fuel supplies?
I think we’re on the first step of the journey. Two
years ago we had nothing. Now we have one unit, and another set of units
starting, next year we’ll have five units… We’re making progress. This fuel
diversification is very important for the entire government.
In your opinion, how
diversified a country should be in terms of nuclear fuel supplies?
In most countries we compete constantly for the fuel
supply even if we build a reactor.This is a start. In addition to fuel, there
are other things that also we think should be diversified. Even in the support
of the plant. We very much want to work with the Ukrainian companies to bring
global technology to them so that they can deploy it into these plants. What
that would do is we believe if you look at the relative opportunities to
improve the performance of a [nuclear power] plant, those are the cheapest Mega
Watts that can be provided to the people of Ukraine.
***It’s about enhancing the initial
projected capacity of nuclear reactors, which allows increasing volumes of
electricity production. There are programs providing for enhancing capacity of
power units by 4%. As usual, such procedures are carried out without
re-equipping the nuclear reactor.
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