Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has inaugurated the installation of a nuclear reactor at the second unit of Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant in Pabna.
With the installation of the reactor pressure vessel, almost all major equipment at the facility are now in place.
Hasina virtually flagged off the installation on Wednesday at an event attended by Alexei Likhachev, director general of Russia’s Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation.
Reactor pressure vessels are thick steel containers that hold nuclear fuel when the reactors operate. The vessels provide one of several barriers that keep radioactive material out of the environment.
Power will be generated from uranium inside the vessel, which will produce electricity. It works as the lifeline of nuclear power plants.
Hasina inaugurated the installation of the first reactor pressure vessel in the first unit of Rooppur power plant on Oct 10, 2021.
The government is hoping that the first unit of Rooppur power plant, having 1,200 MW of power generation capacity, will be able to start supplying power to the national grid next year. If all goes well, the second unit will start supplying power from 2024.
Dr Shaukat Akbar, project director of the power plant, said that the first unit has made 70 percent progress in terms of work.
Shaukat said that 53 percent of the physical construction work of the project has been completed and the financial progress is about 50 percent.
The way the project is progressing, the work can be completed within the stipulated time, he said.
Hasina inaugurated the construction work on the Rooppur nuclear power reactor in November 2017. This began the main phase of construction for Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant.