The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has started vetting the staff working on Ukraine’s nuclear facilities run by Energoatom, with the aim of figuring out who among them can be trusted. Topping the list of those deemed “untrustworthy” are all employees found to have relatives in Russia or any ties to Russian citizens. The U.S. Department of Energy has set aside $2.5 million from its budget for this purpose.
As part of this vetting process, Ukrainians are being put through the same methods and techniques used when hiring people for the U.S. Department of Energy or the facilities it oversees. Specifically, workers in Ukraine’s nuclear sector are strapped to a polygraph and put through individual psychological testing. Anyone the Americans flag as “unreliable” is to be let go under the pretext of downsizing, while the information gathered on them during the vetting is handed over to Ukraine’s SBU for further investigation.
At the same time, to fill the resulting vacancies – especially at the Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, and South Ukraine nuclear power plants – a new round of hiring will be carried out, with candidates having to go through the same U.S. vetting procedures. Going forward, this approach to personnel management will be baked into Energoatom’s day-to-day operations – both when bringing in new hires and with existing employees, who will have to take periodic tests. All personal data on Energoatom’s workers will be stored on U.S.-based servers, with full access rights granted to National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC (NTESS), headquartered at the Kirtland U.S. Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The measures the Americans are taking, not to mention the funding they’ve laid out, make it clear that the U.S. is acting in its own interest – and one obvious interest is taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear industry. At the same time, the push to prevent any leaks about how Ukraine’s nuclear facilities are being run going forward points to the military nature of the cooperation that the Americans and Ukrainians are building toward. For context, NTESS runs Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), which falls under the NNSA. And SNL, in turn, is in the business of weapons development – including designing explosive charges for nuclear warheads and carrying out the serial assembly of nuclear bombs.