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Shady Russian activities at Ukrainian atomic energy plants and agencies risk disaster
The cooling towers of the Rivne nuclear power plant are seen on 25 March, 2022, in Varash, Ukraine.
In March, when Russia seized Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant—Europe’s largest—the actions veered dangerously close to nuclear disaster. National Public Radio, in the U.S., analyzed video and photos from the attack and showed, among other too-close calls, that ordnance landed some 75 meters away from a reactor building. Since then, Zaporizhzhia’s grounds have been used to shelter troops, military equipment, and munitions. According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has also fired cruise missiles over two more nuclear power stations.
Yet, recent evidence suggests that a more opaque threat may also be stalking Ukraine’s four nuclear generating stations: a cloak-and-dagger struggle for control of state nuclear energy firm Energoatom, pitting activist nuclear professionals against alleged Russian agents.
It’s an unstable situation that—like Russia’s military actions—increases the risk of accidents that could spread radiation across Europe and threatens Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Ukraine's 15 reactors generate over half of its electricity. Meanwhile, thanks to Ukraine’s rapid post-invasion synchronization with Europe’s power grid, increasing electricity exports are also helping the embattled nation to finance the war.
But already Ukraine faces the loss of Zaporizhzhia’s power generation, with Russia vowing to hold the surrounding territory indefinitely and rebuilding wrecked transmission lines to reroute the plant's power to occupied Crimea.
Energoatom director of personnel Oleg Boyarintsev is pictured here, having returned to work after detention and questioning by Ukrainian counterintelligence agents. Energoatom
The murky internal battle for Ukraine’s nuclear power popped into sight briefly in late March when a few Ukrainian news outlets and IEEE Spectrum reported that Ukrainian counterintelligence officers had detained and questioned Energoatom director of personnel Oleg Boyarintsev. That cast a shadow over officials across Energoatom that Boyarintsev had appointed.
The conflict quickly slipped back behind the scenes. But Energoatom and its leadership are back in the spotlight. Battle lines have stabilized, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is leading a campaign to out Russian agents. This month Zelenskyy affirmed pervasive infiltration of Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, which routinely places officials at Energoatom headquarters and its plants.
At the same time, moves by SBU counterintelligence agents, deputies in Ukraine’s parliament, and company officials have heightened concerns about the security and safety of Energoatom’s operations.
SBU spy hunters said they pierced an “extensive agent network” last month allegedly led by Boyarintsev’s longtime political patron and business partner Andriy Derkach, whom the SBU and U.S. intelligence agencies say is a Russian agent.
Then, early this month, Energoatom CEO Petro Kotin stunned a panel of deputies probing Energoatom personnel issues. Asked why Boyarintsev was not present as requested, Kotin told the energy committee he had the day off. Then Kotin gave contradictory answers when asked why he recently dismissed the director of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, which lies just under 60 kilometers from Belarus and is the largest still under Ukraine’s control.
Under CEO Petro Kotin, Energoatom has faced repeated accusations of corruption and sliding back toward Russian influence. Ukrinform/Alamy
Kotin said Rivne’s director was suspected of hiding safety violations. At the same time Kotin insisted he was also needed to run the subsidiary racing to start up a recently completed facility to store spent nuclear fuel that was previously sent to Russia. Without the storage facility, Ukraine can’t refuel its reactors, prompting the panel’s chair to note that Kotin assigned an allegedly dodgy official a surprisingly critical mission.
Ukrainian news site Glavcom’s take from the hearing was that Ukraine’s nuclear plants were “in danger,” and that a “hunt for collaborators” was on. The panel’s deputy chairman concurred, posting that “Russian ears are sticking out now from all sides.”
Energoatom did not respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests to reach Boyarintsev, Kotin and other officials. But back in March, the firm attacked its loudest critic, Olga Kosharna, a former advisor to Ukraine’s nuclear regulator. Energoatom said it was Kosharna who was under Russian influence and spreading Russian disinformation.
A defamation suit filed by Kosharna against Energoatom will be heard in October according to a Facebook post from her lawyer, who heads the energy-law committee for Ukraine’s bar association.
Kosharna maintains her March 2022 claim that officials planted by Boyarintsev facilitated the Zaporizhzhia plant’s seizure, including a new plant director appointed eight days before the 24 February invasion. In communications with IEEE Spectrum, she extended that allegation to include Alexander Prismitsky, an SBU officer serving as the plant’s deputy director for physical protection, who she said is the subject of an SBU investigation.
“Russia ... attract[ed] its agents into all the spheres! So, our task for today is to detect them all as soon as possible.” —Margaryta Rayets, Women in Nuclear Ukraine
Boyarintsev did not act alone, according to Kosharna. Andriy Derkach, who the SBU says worked for Russian intelligence under the codename “Veteran,” is suspected of directing Boyarintsev's work at Energoatom. Derkach is a long-serving Ukrainian deputy, a pro-Russian media commentator, and a former Energoatom CEO. His whereabouts since the invasion are unknown.
Derkach gained global notoriety delivering alleged kompromat on U.S. President Joe Biden in 2019. In spite of that, he is widely credited with driving Boyarintsev’s inclusion when Zelenskyy appointed Kotin and a new leadership team in 2020. Why else, ask people like Kosharna and other nuclear professionals, could someone with unsavory associates in organized crime win a job so crucial to Ukraine’s security?
Since Kotin’s team arrived at Energoatom, journalists, activists, and government watchdogs have documented a series of suspicious activities including the dumping of electricity on the market, the illegal dismissal of Energoatom’s independent anti-corruption official, and embezzlement of funds for the long-delayed spent-fuel repository.
Meanwhile, a slide back toward Russian influence is now feared concerning Ukraine’s Russian-designed and mostly Russian-fuelled nuclear plants. Ukrainian security analyst Pavel Kost, who several years ago praised Energoatom as one of the “quiet heroes” of post-Yanukovich Ukraine, last year called out the growing influence of “pro-Russian circles” and “silent sabotage” of crucial projects such as the spent-fuel repository.
It’s no surprise, then, that over half of Ukraine’s parliamentarians called last year for new leadership to improve Energoatom’s operations and assure nuclear safety.
Jeff Merrifield, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member and international nuclear consultant, likened the situation facing Ukraine’s nuclear plants to a “multilayer set of chess.” While he declined to address the specific accusations against Energoatom leaders, Merrifield said they “were not entirely surprising” based on some of the “unsavory” activity he’s observed in 20 years of work in both Ukraine and Russia.
Kosharna, meanwhile, is not the only Ukrainian professional asking tough questions. When asked if many nuclear staff in Ukraine are concerned about Russian agents, Women in Nuclear Ukraine founder Margaryta Rayets messaged IEEE Spectrum that, “Russia did its best in terms of lobbying its interests by attracting its agents into all the spheres! So, our task for today is to detect them all as soon as possible.”
The loudest critical voice among engineers and scientists (at least in writing) is Georgiy Balakan, a former top Energoatom engineer who led collaborations with U.S. national labs, Westinghouse Electric, and European agencies to upgrade safety at Ukraine’s plants. Since April he has posted a series of risk assessments, warnings, and questions aimed at securing Ukraine’s nuclear plants against internal and external attack.
On 10 July, Balakan posted a pointed essay titled “How to avoid nuclear ‘Bucha’ at the nuclear power plants of Ukraine?”—a reference to Russian forces’ scorched-earth devastation of Bucha that shocked the world in April. In it he calls for terminating senior plant officials who are past or present SBU officers, a moratorium on dismissing plant directors, and more.
The panel’s deputy chairman concurred, posting that “Russian ears are sticking out now from all sides.”
An accompanying post emphasized the risks facing the Rivne station. Balakan warns that Russia could seize Rivne via an airborne assault, noting increased Russian activity nearby in Belarus and stepped-up airborne training.
Balakan also argued that the attacks on Rivne's director, Pavlo Pavlyshyn, weaken Rivne by demoralizing plant personnel. Energoatom officials scattered from its headquarters when Russian troops and missiles surged over the border in February and March. But Rivne’s embattled director stood his ground, meetingjournalists to condemn Russia’s irresponsible attacks on nuclear energy installations and garnering international support.
“From the first days of the war, his steadfast patriotic position united everyone,” agreed the City Council of Varash, Rivne’s satellite city, in a recent appeal to Zelenskyy to stop the plant’s “destabilization.” The letter echoed Balakan’s concerns about a “high probability of an armed attack,” and disputed Kotin’s allegations against Pavlyshyn and the plant’s safety.
Ilona Zayets, a journalist and former Energoatom communications aide, told IEEE Spectrum this week that Kotin and his supporters “need to discredit” Pavlyshyn before he gets to Zelenskyy, because Pavlyshyn has the inside scoop on Energoatom’s troubled projects.
If she’s right, they may be too late. Pavlyshyn posted a video this week suggesting that he’s already working against Kotin: ”Dear curators of my resignation. Your involvement in unlawful actions not in the interests of the Ukrainian state will certainly be exposed.”
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on 29 July 2022 and subsequently unpublished for additional editorial review. Spectrum apologizes for any confusion this story’s publication history may have caused.
Peter Fairley has been tracking energy technologies and their environmental implications globally for over two decades, charting engineering and policy innovations that could slash dependence on fossil fuels and the political forces fighting them. He has been a Contributing Editor with IEEE Spectrum since 2003.
A dubious and one-sided article with a lot of bold claims sourced from our Ukrainian friends. I'm only allowed 250 chars, so here we go.
> Odnance landed some 75 meters away from a reactor building.
Fired by very enthusiastic Ukrainian forces.
https://www.rt.com/russia/559733-ukraine-strike-nuclear-plant-disaster/
> Since then, Zaporizhzhia’s grounds have been used to shelter troops, military equipment, and munitions.
According to the Ukrainian government I suppose. But guess who attack the plant?
https://www.rt.com/russia/559319-zaporozhye-nuclear-power-plant-attacked/
"On July 12, Ukrainian UAVs dropped several 120mm shells on a building located next to the power plant, causing damage to its roof and window, the press-service of the Energodar city administration told RIA Novosti. According to the spokesperson of the administration, 11 employees were injured during that attack, with four of them remaining in serious condition."
> Battle lines have stabilized
Not conforming to observed reality. LPR/DPR forces + Russia methodically advance against Ukrainian forces, with the latter increasingly collapsing.
> This month Zelenskyy affirmed pervasive infiltration of Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, which routinely places officials at Energoatom headquarters and its plants.
This announcement and subsequent purge seems to have been an unserious affair, complete with firing and reinstatement of the SBUI head. A standard occurrence of authoritarian regimes starting to feel the pressure.
"Bucha" is about as credible as any "Wag the Dog" show coming currently out of Ukraine.
Utrecht leads the world in using EVs for grid storage
The Dutch city of Utrecht is embracing vehicle-to-grid technology, an example of which is shown here—an EV connected to a bidirectional charger. The historic Rijn en Zon windmill provides a fitting background for this scene.
Hundreds of charging stations for electric vehicles dot Utrecht’s urban landscape in the Netherlands like little electric mushrooms. Unlike those you may have grown accustomed to seeing, many of these stations don’t just charge electric cars—they can also send power from vehicle batteries to the local utility grid for use by homes and businesses.
Debates over the feasibility and value of such vehicle-to-grid technology go back decades. Those arguments are not yet settled. But big automakers like Volkswagen, Nissan, and Hyundai have moved to produce the kinds of cars that can use such bidirectional chargers—alongside similar vehicle-to-home technology, whereby your car can power your house, say, during a blackout, as promoted by Ford with its new F-150 Lightning. Given the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, many people are thinking hard about how to make the best use of all that rolling battery power.
Utrecht, a largely bicycle-propelled city of 350,000 just south of Amsterdam, has become a proving ground for the bidirectional-charging techniques that have the rapt interest of automakers, engineers, city managers, and power utilities the world over. This initiative is taking place in an environment where everyday citizens want to travel without causing emissions and are increasingly aware of the value of renewables and energy security.
“We wanted to change,” says Eelco Eerenberg, one of Utrecht's deputy mayors and alderman for development, education, and public health. And part of the change involves extending the city’s EV-charging network. “We want to predict where we need to build the next electric charging station.”
So it’s a good moment to consider where vehicle-to-grid concepts first emerged and to see in Utrecht how far they’ve come.
It’s been 25 years since University of Delaware energy and environmental expert Willett Kempton and Green Mountain College energy economist Steve Letendre outlined what they saw as a “dawning interaction between electric-drive vehicles and the electric supply system.” This duo, alongside Timothy Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Alec Brooks of AC Propulsion, laid the foundation for vehicle-to-grid power.
The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It’s yet to be shown clearly why that’s good for the driver.
Their initial idea was that garaged vehicles would have a two-way computer-controlled connection to the electric grid, which could receive power from the vehicle as well as provide power to it. Kempton and Letendre’s 1997 paper in the journal Transportation Research describes how battery power from EVs in people’s homes would feed the grid during a utility emergency or blackout. With on-street chargers, you wouldn’t even need the house.
Bidirectional charging uses an inverter about the size of a breadbasket, located either in a dedicated charging box or onboard the car. The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It’s yet to be shown clearly why that’s good for the driver.
This is a vexing question. Car owners can earn some money by giving a little energy back to the grid at opportune times, or can save on their power bills, or can indirectly subsidize operation of their cars this way. But from the time Kempton and Letendre outlined the concept, potential users also feared losing money, through battery wear and tear. That is, would cycling the battery more than necessary prematurely degrade the very heart of the car? Those lingering questions made it unclear whether vehicle-to-grid technologies would ever catch on.
Market watchers have seen a parade of “just about there” moments for vehicle-to-grid technology. In the United States in 2011, the University of Delaware and the New Jersey–based utility NRG Energy signed a technology-license deal for the first commercial deployment of vehicle-to-grid technology. Their research partnership ran for four years.
In recent years, there’s been an uptick in these pilot projects across Europe and the United States, as well as in China, Japan, and South Korea. In the United Kingdom, experiments are now taking place in suburban homes, using outside wall-mounted chargers metered to give credit to vehicle owners on their utility bills in exchange for uploading battery juice during peak hours. Other trials include commercial auto fleets, a set of utility vans in Copenhagen, two electric school buses in Illinois, and five in New York.
These pilot programs have remained just that, though—pilots. None evolved into a large-scale system. That could change soon. Concerns about battery wear and tear are abating. Last year, Heta Gandhi and Andrew White of the University of Rochestermodeled vehicle-to-grid economics and found battery-degradation costs to be minimal. Gandhi and White also noted that battery capital costs have gone down markedly over time, falling from well over US $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to about $140 in 2020.
As vehicle-to-grid technology becomes feasible, Utrecht is one of the first places to fully embrace it.
The key force behind the changes taking place in this windswept Dutch city is not a global market trend or the maturity of the engineering solutions. It’s having motivated people who are also in the right place at the right time.
One is Robin Berg, who started a company called We Drive Solar from his Utrecht home in 2016. It has evolved into a car-sharing fleet operator with 225 electric vehicles of various makes and models—mostly Renault Zoes, but also Tesla Model 3s, Hyundai Konas, and Hyundai Ioniq 5s. Drawing in partners along the way, Berg has plotted ways to bring bidirectional charging to the We Drive Solar fleet. His company now has 27 vehicles with bidirectional capabilities, with another 150 expected to be added in coming months.
In 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, presided over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. Here the king [middle] is shown with Robin Berg [left], founder of We Drive Solar, and Jerôme Pannaud [right], Renault's general manager for Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images
Amassing that fleet wasn’t easy. We Drive Solar’s two bidirectional Renault Zoes are prototypes, which Berg obtained by partnering with the French automaker. Production Zoes capable of bidirectional charging have yet to come out. Last April, Hyundai delivered 25 bidirectionally capable long-range Ioniq 5s to We Drive Solar. These are production cars with modified software, which Hyundai is making in small numbers. It plans to introduce the technology as standard in an upcoming model.
We Drive Solar’s 1,500 subscribers don’t have to worry about battery wear and tear—that’s the company’s problem, if it is one, and Berg doesn’t think it is. “We never go to the edges of the battery,” he says, meaning that the battery is never put into a charge state high or low enough to shorten its life materially.
We Drive Solar is not a free-flowing, pick-up-by-app-and-drop-where-you-want service. Cars have dedicated parking spots. Subscribers reserve their vehicles, pick them up and drop them off in the same place, and drive them wherever they like. On the day I visited Berg, two of his cars were headed as far as the Swiss Alps, and one was going to Norway. Berg wants his customers to view particular cars (and the associated parking spots) as theirs and to use the same vehicle regularly, gaining a sense of ownership for something they don’t own at all.
That Berg took the plunge into EV ride-sharing and, in particular, into power-networking technology like bidirectional charging, isn’t surprising. In the early 2000s, he started a local service provider called LomboXnet, installing line-of-sight Wi-Fi antennas on a church steeple and on the rooftop of one of the tallest hotels in town. When Internet traffic began to crowd his radio-based network, he rolled out fiber-optic cable.
In 2007, Berg landed a contract to install rooftop solar at a local school, with the idea to set up a microgrid. He now manages 10,000 schoolhouse rooftop panels across the city. A collection of power meters lines his hallway closet, and they monitor solar energy flowing, in part, to his company’s electric-car batteries—hence the company name, We Drive Solar.
Berg did not learn about bidirectional charging through Kempton or any of the other early champions of vehicle-to-grid technology. He heard about it because of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster a decade ago. He owned a Nissan Leaf at the time, and he read about how these cars supplied emergency power in the Fukushima region.
“Okay, this is interesting technology,” Berg recalls thinking. “Is there a way to scale it up here?” Nissan agreed to ship him a bidirectional charger, and Berg called Utrecht city planners, saying he wanted to install a cable for it. That led to more contacts, including at the company managing the local low-voltage grid, Stedin. After he installed his charger, Stedin engineers wanted to know why his meter sometimes ran backward. Later, Irene ten Dam at the Utrecht regional development agency got wind of his experiment and was intrigued, becoming an advocate for bidirectional charging.
Berg and the people working for the city who liked what he was doing attracted further partners, including Stedin, software developers, and a charging-station manufacturer. By 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, was presiding over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. “With both the city and the grid operator, the great thing is, they are always looking for ways to scale up,” Berg says. They don’t just want to do a project and do a report on it, he says. They really want to get to the next step.
Those next steps are taking place at a quickening pace. Utrecht now has 800 bidirectional chargers designed and manufactured by the Dutch engineering firm NieuweWeme. The city will soon need many more.
The number of charging stations in Utrecht has risen sharply over the past decade.
“People are buying more and more electric cars,” says Eerenberg, the alderman. City officials noticed a surge in such purchases in recent years, only to hear complaints from Utrechters that they then had to go through a long application process to have a charger installed where they could use it. Eerenberg, a computer scientist by training, is still working to unwind these knots. He realizes that the city has to go faster if it is to meet the Dutch government’s mandate for all new cars to be zero-emission in eight years.
The amount of energy being used to charge EVs in Utrecht has skyrocketed in recent years.
Although similar mandates to put more zero-emission vehicles on the road in New York and California failed in the past, the pressure for vehicle electrification is higher now. And Utrecht city officials want to get ahead of demand for greener transportation solutions. This is a city that just built a central underground parking garage for 12,500 bicycles and spent years digging up a freeway that ran through the center of town, replacing it with a canal in the name of clean air and healthy urban living.
A driving force in shaping these changes is Matthijs Kok, the city’s energy-transition manager. He took me on a tour—by bicycle, naturally—of Utrecht’s new green infrastructure, pointing to some recent additions, like a stationary battery designed to store solar energy from the many panels slated for installation at a local public housing development.
This map of Utrecht shows the city’s EV-charging infrastructure. Orange dots are the locations of existing charging stations; red dots denote charging stations under development. Green dots are possible sites for future charging stations.
“This is why we all do it,” Kok says, stepping away from his propped-up bike and pointing to a brick shed that houses a 400-kilowatt transformer. These transformers are the final link in the chain that runs from the power-generating plant to high-tension wires to medium-voltage substations to low-voltage transformers to people’s kitchens.
There are thousands of these transformers in a typical city. But if too many electric cars in one area need charging, transformers like this can easily become overloaded. Bidirectional charging promises to ease such problems.
Kok works with others in city government to compile data and create maps, dividing the city into neighborhoods. Each one is annotated with data on population, types of households, vehicles, and other data. Together with a contracted data-science group, and with input from ordinary citizens, they developed a policy-driven algorithm to help pick the best locations for new charging stations. The city also included incentives for deploying bidirectional chargers in its 10-year contracts with vehicle charge-station operators. So, in these chargers went.
Experts expect bidirectional charging to work particularly well for vehicles that are part of a fleet whose movements are predictable. In such cases, an operator can readily program when to charge and discharge a car’s battery.
We Drive Solar earns credit by sending battery power from its fleet to the local grid during times of peak demand and charges the cars’ batteries back up during off-peak hours. If it does that well, drivers don’t lose any range they might need when they pick up their cars. And these daily energy trades help to keep prices down for subscribers.
Encouraging car-sharing schemes like We Drive Solar appeals to Utrecht officials because of the struggle with parking—a chronic ailment common to most growing cities. A huge construction site near the Utrecht city center will soon add 10,000 new apartments. Additional housing is welcome, but 10,000 additional cars would not be. Planners want the ratio to be more like one car for every 10 households—and the amount of dedicated public parking in the new neighborhoods will reflect that goal.
Some of the cars available from We Drive Solar, including these Hyundai Ioniq 5s, are capable of bidirectional charging.We Drive Solar
Projections for the large-scale electrification of transportation in Europe are daunting. According to a Eurelectric/Deloitte report, there could be 50 million to 70 million electric vehicles in Europe by 2030, requiring several million new charging points, bidirectional or otherwise. Power-distribution grids will need hundreds of billions of euros in investment to support these new stations .
The morning before Eerenberg sat down with me at city hall to explain Utrecht’s charge-station planning algorithm, war broke out in Ukraine. Energy prices now strain many households to the breaking point. Gasoline has reached $6 a gallon (if not more) in some places in the United States. In Germany in mid-June, the driver of a modest VW Golf had to pay about €100 (more than $100) to fill the tank. In the U.K., utility bills shot up on average by more than 50 percent on the first of April.
The war upended energy policies across the European continent and around the world, focusing people’s attention on energy independence and security, and reinforcing policies already in motion, such as the creation of emission-free zones in city centers and the replacement of conventional cars with electric ones. How best to bring about the needed changes is often unclear, but modeling can help.
Nico Brinkel, who is working on his doctorate in Wilfried van Sark’s photovoltaics-integration lab at Utrecht University, focuses his models at the local level. In his calculations, he figures that, in and around Utrecht, low-voltage grid reinforcements cost about €17,000 per transformer and about €100,000 per kilometer of replacement cable. “If we are moving to a fully electrical system, if we’re adding a lot of wind energy, a lot of solar, a lot of heat pumps, a lot of electric vehicles…,” his voice trails off. “Our grid was not designed for this.”
But the electrical infrastructure will have to keep up. One of Brinkel’s studies suggests that if a good fraction of the EV chargers are bidirectional, such costs could be spread out in a more manageable way. “Ideally, I think it would be best if all of the new chargers were bidirectional,” he says. “The extra costs are not that high.”
Berg doesn’t need convincing. He has been thinking about what bidirectional charging offers the whole of the Netherlands. He figures that 1.5 million EVs with bidirectional capabilities—in a country of 8 million cars—would balance the national grid. “You could do anything with renewable energy then,” he says.
Seeing that his country is starting with just hundreds of cars capable of bidirectional charging, 1.5 million is a big number. But one day, the Dutch might actually get there.
This article appears in the August 2022 print issue as “A Road Test for Vehicle-to-Grid Tech.”