Ukraine ousted Khrushchev and became the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982. Many prominent Soviet sports players, scientists, and artists came from Ukraine. On 26 April 1986, a reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, resulting in the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history. This was the only accident to receive the highest possible rating of 7 by the International Nuclear Event Scale, indicating a "major accident", until the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011. At the time of the accident, 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 2.2 million in Ukraine. After the
South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant following major upgrade work, unit 1 was given a 10-year license extension, which will take it beyond its original 30-year design lifetime. Similar extensions are planned for units 2 and 3, licensed until 2015 and 2019, respectively. The main supplier of fuel for nuclear power plants in Ukraine has been TVEL, with whom NNEGC signed a contract for the supply of nuclear fuel for Ukrainian WMR in 1997 until 2010. Under a US-Ukrainian initiative to reduce Ukraine's dependency on Russia for fuel, tied to the dismantling of its nuclear weapon arsenal, Energoatom had been using reactor core of unit 3