KIEV, June 25 (RIA Novosti) - Ukraine's nuclear power utility Energoatom said Monday a new reactor it plans to build in the country's south will break with a long-standing tradition of using Russian design and technology.

"We imagine this unit as one of a non-Russian type," the company's chief executive, Andrei Derkach, was quoted as saying in a press release.

He said the design for a fourth reactor at the Soviet-era Yuzhno-Ukrainskaya power plant, whose three operational units generate 1,000 megawatts each, will be chosen instead from among proposals submitted by France's Areva, the United States' Westinghouse and a South Korean company.

The country's parliament will have the final say in the selection process.

Ukraine ranks fifth in the world's nuclear power ratio rankings, with NPP-generated electricity accounting for about 47% of its total output as of 2006.

Its three other plants currently in operation include Zaporozhe, Khmelnitsky and Rovno, with a total of 12 reactors.

The Chernobyl station, the first to be built on Ukrainian territory, was halted following the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster to date there in 1986.