Russia’s JSC Atomstroyexport and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) have signed contracts to advance the stage 3 of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant (NPP) in India.
Atomstroyexport is an important foreign trade engineering company of state-controlled Rosatom for construction of nuclear power facilities outside Russia.
The contracts signed by Atomstroyexport with NPCIL pertain to priority design works, working design and supply of the main equipment for units 5 and 6 of the nuclear power plant in Koodankulam in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu state.
Signing of the contracts comes on the back of the XVIII Annual Russian-Indian Summit in June when the ASE Group of Companies and NPCIL had inked the General Framework Agreement for the construction of the third stage of the nuclear plant.
According to JSC ASE EC Southern Asia projects vice-president Andrey Lebedev, the project for building units 5 and 6 of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant is moving to the practical implementation phase.
Lebedev added: “Designing begins, as well as development of procurement procedures of the main equipment of the Russian production to complete Stage III of the Indian nuclear power plant.”
Kudankulam NPP which is the single largest nuclear power plant in India has been planned to comprise six generating units which would have a total capacity of 6GW. Each of the six units is expected to have a capacity of 1GW.
The idea to build it was born out of an inter-governmental agreement in 1988 between India and the then Soviet Union. Although the construction of the project started in 2002, it wasn’t until 2013 that the first of the six units was commissioned and connected to the grid.
The second unit began commercial operations in October 2016. Recently, construction work of units 3 and 4 began, marking the second stage of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant.
Image: Construction site of the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant as pictured in April 2009. Photo: courtesy of Petr Pavlicek/IAEA/Wikipedia.org.