The Ukrainian parliament has approved a law authorising the state-owned nuclear company Energoatom to purchase two Russian-made reactors from Bulgaria for €500m (US$518m). The two nuclear blocks, with a total capacity of 2.2 GW and initially intended for the Belene nuclear power plant cancelled in 2022, will be installed at the Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant and should be connected to the grid within three years. The country seek to compensate for the loss of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (5.7 GW), which is currently controlled by Russia.
Energoatom currently operate two reactors at Khmelnytskyi, with a total capacity of 2 GW. Construction of a third and fourth reactors at the plants started in the 1980s, but was stropped in 1990. Since then, several agreements have been signed to revive the project, including with Rosatom (Russia) in 2011, which was terminated in 2015, and with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power in 2016, but little progress was made. In January 2024, the Ministry of Energy announced plans to start building four new nuclear reactors at Khmelnitsky to make up for the lost capacity due to the Russian invasion; two of the new units would be based on Russian-made equipment and imported from Bulgaria, while the other two would use Western technology from Westinghouse.
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