Chennai: The main equipment for the under construction third unit of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu have been shipped, a key Russian supplier for the project said on Monday.
The Rosatom State Corporation, the main equipment supplier and technical consultant for the Indo-Russian joint venture KNPP in Tirunelveli district in southern Tamilnadu, said it had ‘completed’ the supply of the materials, including embedded parts of the reactor pit.
“The shipment consisted of the molten core catcher, embedded parts of the reactor pit, dry protection, heat-insulation of the cylindrical shell/barrel, truss buckstay (and) reactor vessel,” it said in an official release.
These were part of the enhanced safety features in the reactors, it said.
According to the release, a “core melt localisation device (CMLD), or a core catcher is one of the most important passive safety systems of modern nuclear power plants of Russian design”.
“CMLD is installed at the bottom of the plant’s protective shell. It is designed to localise and cool the molten core material in case of a hypothetical accident that could lead to damage to the core,” the release said.
It allows the integrity of the protective shell to be preserved and thus excludes radioactive emission in the environment, even if the hypothetical accident was “serious”, Rosatom added.