India's Kudankulam nuclear power plant unit resumes power generation after over four months

Kudankulam (Tamil Nadu): The first unit of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, "taken offline" for refuelling and maintenance in April, resumed power generation on Tuesday, a senior site official said.
"At 06:37 hours on August 29, 2017 KKNPP 1 was synchronised with the southern grid. Presently the unit is producing 300 MW electricity and the power raise will happen gradually," S.V. Jinna, Site Director, said in a release.
The 1000 MW VVER (water-cooled water-moderated) unit belonging to the Pressurised Water Reactor category uses enriched uranium oxide fuel to generate electricity, he said.
As per the prescribed guidelines, at the end of a fuel cycle, which approximately lasts for 7000 hours, the used fuel cells are to be replaced with fresh fuel assemblies, Jinna said.
"For this planned activity, the unit was taken offline on April 13, 2017," he said, adding this was the second fuel outage at KKNPP 1, an Indo-Russian joint venture located at Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu.
The unloading of spent fuels from the reactor core and loading of fresh fuels had been carried out with the help of a fully automated refuelling machine, he said.
About one-third of the total 163 fuel assemblies had been replaced with fresh ones, while the rest were repositioned for "even burning," Jinna added. "Besides, various maintenance activities of systems and equipment have also been carried out during this outage. Subsequently, all the necessary tests were conducted and all the safety systems have been tested as per the regulations," Jinna added.
After fulfilling all the requirements, the unit was "made critical" on August 24 rpt August 24 and mandatory post-criticality tests were carried out, he added.
Unit-2 of KKNPP was under maintenance and will be back on the stream after maintenance is over, he said.
The two 1000 MW power units has so far generated 18758 million units of electricity, he said.
Construction work of units three and four of KKNPP commenced on June 29 with the ceremonial pouring of concrete. The General Framework Agreement for units five and six had been signed on June 1.