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Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly said that the United States is interested in using Zaporizhzhia’s nuclear electricity for crypto mining.
Russia and the US are negotiating joint control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, according to a report from Kyiv Post, citing Russian business newspaper Kommersant. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located in Southeastern Ukraine and is the largest nuclear energy facility in Europe. It used to be responsible for more than a fifth of the electricity in Ukraine, but in 2022, Russian forces captured it, and it has since ceased power generation.
It would now appear that discussions have emerged about the future use of the power plant. As per the report, Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with major business figures on Christmas Eve that the US is interested in using the plant’s electricity for crypto mining and for supplying power to Ukraine.
Crypto mining, the most prominent example of which is Bitcoin mining, can be an energy-intensive process, leveraging computing power to solve mathematical puzzles that allow the operator to have a chance at adding the next block to the blockchain.
Crypto mining has features like portability and modularity that have made many consider its application in using waste or excess energy in power grids to produce value in the form of digital assets. On a global scale, Bitcoin mining has seen some rapid expansion during the past three years, with the Hashrate, a measure of the network’s total computing power, expanding by almost five times.
Restarting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant for crypto mining, or any other purpose, however, wouldn’t be a simple task. By late 2022, all six reactors of the plant were shut down, with five of them being put in a state of cold shutdown.
One reactor was kept in hot shutdown to produce steam for nuclear safety purposes. Even so, the plant isn’t in a state where a restart is possible, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As the IAEA wrote in a press release earlier this year:
Nuclear safety remains precarious at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) and its six reactors cannot be restarted as long as the military conflict continues to jeopardize the situation at the site, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told IAEA Member States this week.
Given this context, it only remains to be seen whether any reported negotiations around the nuclear power plant will actually lead it to be used for any energy-related purpose, crypto mining or otherwise.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $88,600, up 1.3% over the last 24 hours.
