Environmentalists disturbed by plans to build a storage area for nuclear waste

Independent environmentalists have criticized the plan to build a storage unit for use nuclear fuel. Negotiations on this were held on Monday in Kyiv by the Minister of Fuel and Energy Yury Boiko and the head of the American company “Holtec”, Chris Singh.

In summing up the talks with the head of “Holtec”, Yury Boiko expressed the hope that the construction of the new storage unit would be completed in three years. According to the plan, nuclear waste would be stored there from the Rivne, Khmelnytsky and South Ukrainian nuclear power stations. Boiko asserted that this would make it possible to save around eighty million dollars over five years.

However the coordinator of the Ukrainian National Environmental Centre Oleksy Pasyuk in an interview to Deutsche Welle maintained that the transportation of used nuclear fuel to the centralized storage place would increase the danger of accidents and the independent environmentalists are therefore calling for three different storage units to be constructed, one for each nuclear power plan. Oleksy Pasyuk comments that the government did not consult the public on this issue and is effectively satisfying the wishes of only “Energoatom” and American businesspeople.