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Rolls-Royce is in talks with Ukraine’s biggest private power company to build a string of mini nuclear power plants in the country, The Telegraph can reveal.
DTEK, which is part of billionaire businessman Rinat Akhmetov’s industrial group, has held early discussions with Rolls about developing small modular reactors (SMRs) at sites currently operated by coal power stations.
Maxim Timchenko, the company’s chief executive, said he expects nuclear power to form an important part of DTEK’s future portfolio as Ukraine is rebuilt and his country switches away from fossil fuels.
DTEK and Rolls are examining whether up to eight existing coal power station sites, two of them currently in territory occupied by Russia, could eventually be converted to house SMRs in the 2030s.
It comes as Ukraine is scrambling to deploy less centralised and more renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar farms, in the face of a targeted bombing campaign by Russia to take out grid infrastructure during the harsh winter months.
In May, DTEK began generating power from the Tyligulska wind farm, 60 miles from the frontline of the war, in southern Ukraine, which was assembled during wartime in just nine months. This month it announced plans to quadruple the site’s capacity.
Mr Timchenko said renewables remained key to boosting energy security as individual wind turbines make much harder missile targets than large coal power plants. However, he said a large chunk of power will also need to come from less intermittent sources such as nuclear.
In an interview, he told The Telegraph: “We are trying to find a way to install these SMRs.
“From our side, we have quite a big capacity of coal-fired power stations and we are in discussions with Rolls-Royce SMR to convert [them].”
Ukraine is already one of the world’s biggest users of nuclear power, with the state owning four plants that generated more than half of the country’s power before Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s military to invade.
One of the sites, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, now sits in occupied territory and has become a flashpoint, with Ukraine and Russia each accusing each other of reckless shelling that risks setting off a nuclear disaster.
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