Energoatom
Based on Wikipedia: Energoatom
In November 2025, Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau announced it had gathered over a thousand hours of secret recordings as evidence of a massive kickback scheme at the heart of the nation's nuclear power industry. The alleged rake-off: one hundred million dollars. Within days, the company's entire supervisory board was dismissed, and two cabinet ministers resigned at President Zelensky's request.
The company at the center of this scandal is Energoatom, and understanding it means understanding something fundamental about modern Ukraine: this single state enterprise produces more than half of all the electricity Ukrainians use. Every light switch flipped in Kyiv, every factory humming in Kharkiv, every hospital running in Lviv—the odds are better than even that Energoatom's nuclear reactors are behind it.
What Exactly Is Energoatom?
Energoatom is Ukraine's national nuclear energy company. Founded in October 1996, it operates all four of Ukraine's active nuclear power plants: Zaporizhzhia, Rivne, South Ukraine, and Khmelnytskyi. Together, these facilities house fifteen nuclear reactors—thirteen of the larger VVER-1000 type and two smaller VVER-440 units—with a combined generating capacity of nearly fourteen thousand megawatts.
To put that in perspective: Ukraine ranks seventh in the world for nuclear power capacity, and second in Europe. Only France, with its fifty-six reactors, surpasses Ukraine on the continent. This isn't a minor player in the global energy picture. It's a heavyweight.
The company also operates hydroelectric facilities that complement its nuclear fleet. The Oleksandrivska Hydroelectric Plant contributes a modest twenty-five megawatts, while the Tashlyk Pumped-Storage Power Plant adds over four hundred and fifty megawatts of flexible capacity—power that can be ramped up or down quickly to match demand, something nuclear plants alone cannot easily do.
The Company Towns
Here's something that makes Energoatom unusual: its power plants don't just dominate Ukraine's electricity grid. They dominate entire cities.
In Energodar, Varash, Pivdennoukrainsk, and Netishyn, more than half the population either works at the local nuclear plant or lives with someone who does. These are company towns in the truest sense—communities that exist because of the reactors, whose rhythms are set by shift changes and maintenance schedules, whose economic fate is inseparable from the fortunes of a single employer.
When the 2022 Russian invasion began, this reality took on a darker dimension. Energodar, home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant, became occupied territory. The fate of thousands of nuclear workers and their families became entangled with military operations in ways that made international observers deeply uneasy.
A Brief History of Crisis Management
Energoatom's history reads like a case study in navigating institutional chaos.
The company was born from the ashes of the Soviet nuclear program. When it was established in 1996, it consolidated the management of all Ukrainian nuclear plants—including, initially, Chernobyl. Yes, that Chernobyl. The site of the 1986 disaster remained under Energoatom's umbrella until 2001, when it was finally transferred out as decommissioning work continued.
In 2011, the company launched an ambitious safety upgrade program in response to international standards—and, implicitly, to the fresh memories of the Fukushima disaster in Japan that same year. The original budget was 1.8 billion dollars, with a target completion date of 2017. That deadline slipped to 2020 due to financing problems, then was extended again to 2023, and later to 2025 after Russia's full-scale invasion made everything harder.
The intervening years brought wave after wave of scandal and restructuring. In 2015, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk raised corruption concerns about the company. By March 2016, Ukrainian courts had frozen Energoatom's bank accounts over disputed debts—a remarkable situation for a company producing half the nation's electricity. The accounts were unfrozen three months later, but the episode highlighted how governance struggles could threaten even critical infrastructure.
The Leadership Carousel
If you want to understand the instability that has plagued Ukrainian state enterprises, look at Energoatom's leadership changes.
In November 2019, the CEO was fired. The government's stated reasons included "inefficient management, suspicion of embezzlement of state funds and mismanagement of procurement." Energoatom's press office issued a rebuttal. A new acting head was appointed in December.
Then came months of internal battles over who should lead the company. Should top positions go to nuclear industry veterans who understood the technical complexities? Or to outside managers—lawyers and financiers—who might bring fresh perspectives on governance and economics? The disputes dragged on through early 2020, a difficult financial period when the company couldn't even afford to purchase new fuel from its American supplier Westinghouse in the first quarter.
The resolution, such as it was, came in May 2020 when the cabinet appointed a lawyer and a financier to key vice-presidential roles. The nuclear specialists lost that round.
In January 2021, President Zelensky ordered a more dramatic change: management of Energoatom was transferred from the Energy Ministry to direct government control. The stated goal was improved oversight, but the move also helped satisfy European Union requirements for separating electricity transmission, generation, and retail—conditions Ukraine needed to meet for closer integration with European systems.
That integration became urgent faster than anyone expected. On February 24, 2022—the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion—Ukraine disconnected its electricity grid from the post-Soviet network it had been part of since the Cold War. Within weeks, it had synchronized with the continental European grid instead. A technical achievement that had been planned to take years was accomplished under wartime pressure in days.
The Plants Themselves
Let's look at what Energoatom actually operates.
Zaporizhzhia: Europe's Nuclear Giant
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is the largest in Europe and among the largest in the world. Its six reactors, each capable of generating one thousand megawatts, began coming online in 1984. Over its lifetime, the plant has produced more than 1.1 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to power millions of homes for decades.
The plant sits on the shore of the Kakhovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine. Since March 2022, it has been under Russian military occupation, a situation that has created unprecedented safety concerns. A nuclear power plant is not meant to operate in a war zone. The facility has experienced multiple power outages, shelling incidents, and the evacuation of many skilled workers. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, has maintained a continuous presence at the site, issuing regular warnings about deteriorating conditions.
Zaporizhzhia also houses Ukraine's first dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel—a critical piece of infrastructure for managing the radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation.
Rivne: The Pioneer
The Rivne Nuclear Power Plant holds a special place in Ukrainian nuclear history: it was the first in the country to use pressurized water reactors of the VVER type, the Soviet-designed technology that would become standard across Ukraine and much of the Eastern bloc.
Construction began in 1973, making Rivne's origins older than Ukraine's independence. Its first reactor started operating in 1980. Today, the plant runs four reactors—two of the older, smaller VVER-440 design and two larger VVER-1000 units—producing about twenty billion kilowatt-hours annually.
What makes Rivne notable to nuclear safety experts is its monitoring systems. The plant operates an automated radiation monitoring system equipped with seismic sensors and a decision support system called RODOS—a Real Time Online Decision Support system that helps operators respond to potential emergencies. Industry observers have called it one of the most sophisticated monitoring setups in the world.
Khmelnytskyi: Gateway to Europe
The Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant sits at a geographic and strategic crossroads, near the borders of three Ukrainian regions: Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, and Ternopil. This location in western Ukraine, far from the conflict zones in the east and south, has made it particularly significant for Ukraine's ambitions to export electricity to European markets.
The plant's two reactors began operating in 1987 and 1988, generating about fifteen billion kilowatt-hours per year. Ukrainian officials have long viewed Khmelnytskyi as the most promising facility for realizing the country's export potential—a gateway through which Ukrainian electrons could flow westward into the European grid.
South Ukraine: The American Connection
The South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant represents Ukraine's most important break from Soviet-era supply chains.
For decades, all of Ukraine's nuclear fuel came from Russia. The reactor designs were Russian, the fuel rods were manufactured in Russia, and the technical expertise flowed from Moscow. This dependency became increasingly uncomfortable as relations with Russia deteriorated, especially after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The solution was diversification, and South Ukraine led the way. The plant became the first in Ukraine to operate with fuel supplied by Westinghouse, the American nuclear technology company. Since 2018, one reactor has run exclusively on American fuel; since 2020, a second has as well.
This matters enormously. Nuclear fuel isn't something you can switch overnight. Reactor cores are designed around specific fuel specifications, and loading incompatible fuel could damage the reactor or create safety hazards. The years-long process of qualifying Westinghouse fuel for Soviet-designed reactors was a major technical and political achievement—one that became even more valuable after 2022, when Russian fuel supplies were no longer an option.
The South Ukraine complex also includes the Tashlyk Pumped-Storage Power Plant, which provides crucial flexibility to the grid. Pumped storage works like a giant battery: when electricity demand is low, excess power pumps water uphill into a reservoir; when demand peaks, the water flows back down through turbines to generate power quickly. In a grid dominated by nuclear plants that prefer to run at constant output, this flexibility is invaluable.
Safety in a Dangerous World
Nuclear power occupies a peculiar place in public consciousness. The technology is simultaneously one of the safest forms of electricity generation—measured by deaths per unit of energy produced—and one of the most feared. The specter of Chernobyl hangs over Ukraine more than anywhere else.
Energoatom has responded by making safety its stated top priority, placing it above "economic, technical, scientific and other objectives" in official policy documents. Whether this rhetoric matches reality has been the subject of ongoing international scrutiny.
The company participates in multiple international oversight regimes. It is a member of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, an industry group that conducts peer reviews of nuclear facilities worldwide. It hosts regular inspection missions from the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has committed to the Convention on Nuclear Safety, which requires periodic international meetings to review compliance.
Around each nuclear plant, automated radiation monitoring systems continuously measure environmental conditions, looking for any sign of a release. These systems feed data to decision-support software that helps operators understand what's happening and what to do about it.
The Comprehensive Consolidated Safety Upgrade Program, launched in 2011, aimed to bring all Ukrainian plants up to international standards, particularly in light of lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster. That catastrophe, triggered by a tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at a Japanese nuclear plant, prompted safety reviews worldwide. In Ukraine, the program focused on improving resilience to natural disasters and extreme situations, and on enhancing the ability to manage accidents if they occurred.
The program was supposed to be finished by now. It isn't. Financing delays pushed the timeline back repeatedly, and the war has made everything harder. Whether Ukraine's nuclear plants are adequately prepared for the challenges they face—including challenges no one anticipated when the safety program was designed—remains an open and urgent question.
The Corruption Shadow
And then there is the corruption.
The November 2025 investigation by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, known by its Ukrainian acronym NABU, alleged a systematic scheme to extract bribes from contractors doing business with Energoatom. According to NABU, a government adviser and the company's security director had taken control of purchasing decisions and were demanding kickbacks of ten to fifteen percent from contractors who wanted their deals approved.
The scale was staggering: an alleged one hundred million dollars in corrupt payments. NABU said it had spent fifteen months gathering evidence, including over a thousand hours of recorded conversations.
The political fallout was immediate. The entire supervisory board that had been appointed just a year and a half earlier was dismissed. The Justice Minister and Energy Minister both resigned at President Zelensky's request. The CEO who had been appointed in 2020 was removed by the supervisory board just months before, in August 2025, though that dismissal came with no public explanation.
This was not an isolated incident in Energoatom's history. The corruption concerns raised by Prime Minister Yatsenyuk in 2015, the court-ordered asset freezes in 2016, the allegations of embezzlement cited when the CEO was fired in 2019—the pattern suggests systemic vulnerability to graft.
Some context helps explain why. Energoatom is a massive organization—nearly thirty-four thousand employees as of early 2022—controlling billions of dollars in assets and contracts. It operates in a country that has struggled with corruption across all sectors of government and industry. It is strategically vital, which means political interests are never far from management decisions. And it deals with technologies and supply chains so complex that oversight is genuinely difficult.
None of this excuses corruption. But it helps explain why rooting it out has proven so hard.
The War and After
The 2022 Russian invasion transformed Energoatom from a troubled but functioning state enterprise into something unprecedented: a nuclear power company operating under conditions of active warfare.
The Zaporizhzhia plant fell under Russian occupation within weeks of the invasion. Workers faced impossible choices—continue operating the facility under armed occupation, or abandon reactors that could become dangerous if left unattended. Many stayed. Many fled. The situation has remained precarious ever since, with regular reports of shelling near the plant, power outages that threatened cooling systems, and the ongoing presence of military equipment in areas meant to be demilitarized.
The other three plants continued operating under Ukrainian control, but with new stresses. The electricity grid, disconnected from Russia and quickly linked to Europe, had to handle demand patterns and technical requirements different from what it was designed for. Staff faced the same wartime hardships as all Ukrainians—mobilization orders, displacement, anxiety about family members in occupied or contested areas.
Through it all, the lights mostly stayed on. That's no small achievement. When historians eventually assess Ukraine's wartime resilience, the continued functioning of its nuclear power plants will deserve a chapter of its own.
What Comes Next
Energoatom's future is inseparable from Ukraine's future, and Ukraine's future remains profoundly uncertain.
If the war ends with Ukraine retaining control of its territory, the Zaporizhzhia plant will need extensive rehabilitation. Years of occupation, shelling, and deferred maintenance cannot be undone quickly. The company will face massive reconstruction costs at a time when the Ukrainian economy will be struggling with the broader challenges of postwar recovery.
If the war ends differently—with Zaporizhzhia remaining under Russian control—Ukraine would lose a third of its nuclear generating capacity. The remaining plants would have to work harder, and the country's energy security would be fundamentally compromised.
Either way, Energoatom will need to address its governance problems. The pattern of corruption allegations, leadership turmoil, and financial crises that has characterized the company since its founding cannot continue if Ukraine hopes to integrate more closely with European institutions. The European Union has standards for how state enterprises should be managed, and Energoatom has often fallen short of them.
There is also the question of what role nuclear power should play in Ukraine's long-term energy mix. The global climate crisis has revived interest in nuclear power as a source of low-carbon electricity, and Ukraine's existing nuclear capacity is an asset in this context. But building new nuclear plants is enormously expensive and takes many years. Whether Ukraine will have the resources and stability to maintain its existing fleet, let alone expand it, remains to be seen.
For now, Energoatom continues to do what it has done for nearly three decades: keep the reactors running, the lights on, and the country powered through whatever crisis comes next. It is a job that has never been easy and has lately become almost impossibly hard. The company's workers—the technicians monitoring control rooms, the engineers maintaining cooling systems, the security personnel guarding facilities—deserve recognition for work that most Ukrainians never see but depend on every moment of every day.
The institution they work for is flawed. Its history is marred by corruption and mismanagement. Its future is uncertain. But in a country fighting for its survival, Energoatom remains essential: the beating heart of Ukraine's energy system, generating power for a nation that refuses to go dark.