Russia, Bangladesh approve and initial agreement on Rooppur NPP spent fuel management
MOSCOW. March 20 (Interfax) - Russia and Bangladesh have approved and initialed an agreement on the management of spent fuel from the future Rooppur nuclear power plant, Rosatomn, the Russian state nuclear corporation, said in a press release.
The agreement was initialed during consultations in Dhaka on March 14-15 between Nikolai Spassky, deputy CEO of Rosatom, Alexei Ferapontov, deputy head of the Federal Environmental, Industrial and Nuclear Supervision Service (Rostekhnadzor) and officials from Bangladesh.
"By mutual agreement the preparation of the intergovernmental agreement on spent fuel management of the Rooppur NPP was made a central issue of the negotiations," Rosatom said.
The parties agreed that they will prepare the agreement for signing as soon as possible.
The parties also coordinated their positions regarding the schedule of events related to completion of the preparatory phase contracts and the beginning of the main phase of the Rooppur NPP construction. Both sides came to a general understanding that the key objective for the coming period is to ensure the "first concrete" pouring at the power Unit 1 of the Rooppur NPP within the approved time frame.
To achieve this, a special working group has been created in order to ensure current cooperation involving two regulators, the customer and the general contractor.
The preliminary results of the scheduled work will be presented during the planned meeting of the Joint Coordination Council which is to be held in Moscow in June-July 2017.
Rosatom signed an agreement to build the Rooppur NPP, which is located on the eastern bank of the Ganges River 160 km from the capital of Dhaka, in December 2015. The plant will have two 1200 MW generating units with VVER reactors.
The general designer will be JSC NIAEP, JSC Atomstroyexport will carry out the construction.