The explosion of reactor no. 4 in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in the early morning of April 26, 1986, is still the biggest civilian nuclear catastrophe the world has ever seen. Huge swaths of Europe were blanketed with radiation; helpless officials at the disaster site sent an unknown number of emergency personnel to their deaths. The calamity was a shock for the entire world -- Ukrainians especially. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, both the populace and the parliament of the newly independent Ukraine leaned against continuing with nuclear power and at the start of the 1990s, the parliament passed a moratorium on it, and no further reactors were to be built.

But the memory of Chernobyl faded, as did awareness of the dangers and popular fear. Two new-model reactor blocks in Chmelnitzki and Rowno -- about 80-percent complete in the '90s -- were recently finished despite the moratorium, and fired up two years ago. Old scruples vanished. A small, politically-insignificant group of Greens called for a nuclear phase-out this year before parliamentary elections in March -- with no success. In the meantime, four still-active plants with 15 reactor blocks supply about half of Ukraine's domestically-produced electricity.

A showdown with Russia over natural gas in January also sent a shudder through Ukraine. The Kremlin -- Ukraine's largest energy supplier, and a controlling interest in the Russian giant Gazprom -- cut off the flow of natural gas in a bitter, politicized price dispute. In Europe's second-largest country, millions were forced to go without heat and in mid-January, President Viktor Yushchenko announced that his nation would start to enrich uranium from its own reserves. The goal, he said, was to free Ukraine of energy imports within five years.

Four weeks ago there was another telling initiative: The cabinet passed a plan for Ukraine's energy strategy through 2030. This plan names numbers without suggesting how they might be achieved. A nice idea, but impractical, according to experts.

Gas imports, for example, are supposed to fall from the current 80 percent of consumption to just 20 percent in 2030. Demand for gas is supposed to sink from 76 billion cubic meters to 49 billion. At the same time, demand for coal is meant to double (from 65 million tons in 2005 to 153 million tons in 2030). In 25 years Ukraine also wants to double its supply of electricity (to anywhere from 330 to 440 billion kilowatt-hours, depending on economic growth, from the current 180 billion).

Still, Ukraine in the past year has bought more than half its energy from abroad. Around 20 percent comes from nuclear sources. Half of that is domestic; the rest comes from Russia. Along with Russian gas, Ukraine wants to free itself from Russian nuclear power, and by 2030 there should be no more nuclear imports, and the total portion of nuclear energy is meant to rise from 20 to 36 percent.

Which is the reason Kiev wants to build new nuclear power plants. All four currently-active reactors will end their tenures in four years. They will almost certainly be extended; the nation can't afford to let the plants go dark. No replacement blocks have been built -- and there's no budget for mothballing the old ones. Construction of five new Russian-modeled reactors will start in five years -- according to the government plan -- and a total of 14 should be humming by 2030.

These plans, of course, lag behind Russia's. Sergei Kiriyenko, CEO of the nuclear company Rosatom, says Moscow aims to build 40 new reactors in the next 25 years. The fraction of nuclear energy in Russia's domestic "mix" is supposed to rise from 16 to about 25 percent; the extra electricity would let Moscow export more oil and natural gas.

As in Germany and other atomic-energy-producing nations, the problem of storing used, radioactive fuel rods still isn't solved. No one has come up with a final storage place in Ukraine and so far there's been only a feasibility study for an interim-storage facility, which an American firm is supposed to build.