Initial fuel load arrives for Bangladesh's Rooppur unit 2
Victoria Shinder1 min readThe initial fuel load for unit 2 of the Rooppur nuclear power plant in Bangladesh has been delivered, World Nuclear News reports, citing Rosatom. The fuel assemblies were made at the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant, part of Rosatom's fuel division TVEL, flown by cargo plane and then trucked to the site, where they are in a specialised storage facility. All items go through incoming visual and instrumental inspection by Bangladeshi experts together with representatives of the general contractor and the manufacturer.
Unit 1 is further ahead. It received its operating licence from the Bangladesh Nuclear Regulatory Authority on 16 April, its 163 fuel assemblies were loaded by May, and it achieved criticality at 15:34 on 11 October. Fresh fuel for its first refuelling, due after the initial one-year cycle, was delivered earlier this autumn.
The two-unit plant, about 160 kilometres from Dhaka, is being built by Rosatom for the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission under a 2011 agreement; the initial contract, worth $12.65 billion, was signed in December 2015. Construction of unit 1 began in November 2017 and of unit 2 in July 2018. Both have an initial life of 60 years with a possible 20-year extension.
What it means
Fuel on site is the last physical input before loading, so the next milestones for unit 2 are regulatory — an operating licence, then fuel loading — and they followed unit 1 by months, not years. For Bangladesh, the practical question is the grid: two units of this size are a large share of a system that has never run nuclear power, and how the first one behaves through commissioning will shape the second.