(Reuters) – The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine which Russia captured last year will stop using U.S.-produced nuclear fuel as quickly as possible, the Interfax news agency quoted a Russian official as saying on Thursday.
The biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, mostly built in the Soviet times, originally used Russian nuclear fuel, but Ukraine gradually switched to supplies from Westinghouse after its first conflict with Russia in 2014.
Last year, Russian troops took over the plant as they invaded parts of Ukraine and the facility has since been at the centre of a nuclear security crisis due to near-constant shelling in its vicinity which Kyiv and Moscow blame on each other.
Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the general director of Russian nuclear energy firm Rosenergoatom which is now in charge of the plant, told Interfax that it had about four years’ worth of U.S.-made fuel in reserves.
But the Russian management will seek to replace that fuel with the Russian one as quickly as possible as it considers its own technologies superior, he said.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
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