Kudankulam plant may start by August: NPCIL

New Delhi: NPCIL today said it expected things to return to normal at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project within the next four to six weeks, paving way for its commissioning by August. “I expect that in four to six weeks things would come to normal (at Kudankulam),” a top official of the public-sector enterprise (NPCIL) said in New Delhi.[caption id=“attachment_222001” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Hope for commission. AFP”]  [/caption] He said nuclear scientists would require another four months after things return to normal to commission the first 1,000 MW unit of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP). The hopes for resolution of the months long agitation against KNPP had brightened when the Tamil Nadu government set up a four-member team headed by S Iniyan to look into the concerns of local people over the project. NPCIL has launched a massive awareness campaign in and around Kudankulam informing the people on the safety aspects of the plant. Jingles for mobile phones, awareness through FM radio and television and distributing over million handouts are some of the methods adopted by the nuclear operator to inform the people on various aspects of the plant. The four-member team had visited Kudankulam and reviewed safety measures at the nuclear power plant and also interacted with the protesters. The panel is expected to give its report to the state government soon. Meanwhile, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials carried out inspection of the fuel for the KNPP stored at the plant site on Monday. “We had purchased the fuel from Russia under IAEA safeguards agreement. IAEA officials carried out routine inspections to ensure that the fuel was not diverted for purposes other than generation of power,” the NPCIL official said. However, since the Kudankulam plant is not operational, the officials visited the fuel storage room to cross check the fuel inventory which is kept in a sealed box. Since the fuel is procured under international safeguards the entire route from the storage room to the reactor where it is loaded is kept under round-the-clock surveillance of video cameras. “There are multiple CCTV cameras on the entire route to monitor the movement of fuel,” he said, adding that utmost care has to be taken to keep them operational round-the-clock. If the cameras are dysfunctional, it has to be reported to the IAEA and proper logs of have to be maintained for the reason of the failure. The IAEA inspectors also checked the memory cards of the surveillance cameras to check out whether there were any blackouts, he said. Two 1,000 MW nuclear power plants, built by the NPCIL with Russian collaboration, are in advanced stages of completion and are awaiting the protests to be called of to start operations. PTI