Moscow building two VVER reactors at Ganges River site
Russia has delivered the first batch of nuclear fuel to the Rooppur nuclear power station construction site in Bangladesh.
Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom is general designer and general contractor for the two-unit station, on the eastern bank of the Ganges River about 160 km from the capital Dhaka.
Moscow is supplying two VVER-1200 pressurised water reactor (PWR) units for Rooppur under a general contract signed in 2015.
Rosatom said delivery and receipt of the fuel was marked by a ceremony attended virtually by Russian president Vladimir Putin, Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Rafael Grossi. Rosatom director-general Alexey Likhachev attended the ceremony in person.
Likhachev said: “This day marks a new stage in the development of Russian-Bangladeshi relations. After the delivery of nuclear fuel, Rooppur becomes a nuclear facility, and the People’s Republic of Bangladesh gets the status of a country that possesses peaceful nuclear technologies.”
According to the IAEA, construction of Rooppur-1 began in November 2017 and of Rooppur-2 in July 2018.
According to the IAEA, once operational, the two reactors at Rooppur will generate 2,400 MW of round-the-clock clean electricity.
The agency said the introduction of nuclear power in Bangladesh is about more than just energy. The Rooppur project is at the heart of an ambitious initiative to transform a developing country into a developed economy by 2041, in part by scaling up electricity production, with some 2.7 million homes set to be connected to the grid over the next year alone.
The fuel for Rooppur being unloaded from an aircraft. Courtesy Rosatom.
