A first reactor at the nuclear power station …

A Ukrainian nuclear reactor was fully loaded – for the first time – with US fuel instead of Russian fuel, the factory operator said Thursday in a context where Kiev is trying to reduce its energy dependence vis-à-vis Moscow.

The reactor number 3 at the Iujnoukrainsk power station, in the south of the country, will now operate only with fuel supplied by the Westinghouse Group, announced Energoatom, the state-owned company that operates the four Ukrainian nuclear power plants.

"We are proud to continue to support Ukraine in diversifying its" energy supply ", congratulated Aziz Dag, vice president of Westinghouse, Toshiba's US subsidiary in Japan, who will be the winners and winners. the losers: the price the government imposed on gas? "/> ASKING AND Who will be the winners and losers of the government's gas price?

Westinghouse supplies nuclear fuel to Kiev in 2005, but it has been used up to now with the Russian monopoly TVEL

Ukraine holds 15 nuclear reactors in the four operational centers. Westinghouse currently supplies a total of six Ukrainian reactors, according to a press release from the US company.

In 2014 – after the coming to power of pro-Westerners and the crisis with neighboring Russia – Kiev signed an agreement with Westinghouse

Two years later, Moscow declared that it had fear of "incidents" in Ukrainian nuclear power plants because of the use of Westinghouse fuel

Ukrainian authorities rejected these statements, which they had

Relations between Kiev and Moscow are at lowest level since the annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula by Russia in 2014 and the outbreak of a conflict the same year in eastern Ukraine armed with separatist separatists, which have done more than 10,000 deaths.

Soviet Ukraine suffered the worst accusation in 1986 nuclear installation in history at the Chernobyl plant, closed in 2000.