After brief shutdown, Kudankulam to restart power generation today

Chennai: The first unit of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, which was shut down after running for a couple of hours, would resume generation Wednesday evening and is expected to produce 300 to 350 MWe from Thursday, a senior KNPP official said on Wednesday. “After running for a couple of hours, we shut down the unit yesterday following a mandatory procedure. We will start the unit again this evening and we are aiming at producing some 300 to 350 MWe of power from tomorrow morning,” KNPP Site Director RS Sundar told PTI over phone. [caption id=“attachment_1189329” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Kudnakulam Nuclear Plant. PTI[/caption] The first unit of KNPP, which was synchronised on Tuesday with the southern power grid, produced 165 MWe power in two hours before it was shut down. To a query, Sundar said power generation would be increased gradually towards the 1000 MWe benchmark by December this year once the unit attains operational stability. The synchronisation on Tuesday coincided with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s two-day visit to Russia, which has supplied the nuclear reactors for the plant. Unit 1 had attained criticality on 13 July. Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd is constructing two 1,000 MW units at KNPP jointly with Russia at Kudankulam in Tiruneveli district, some 650 km from Chennai. PTI