The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) said Tuesday that it planned to replace the coolant channels of the two reactors at the Kakrapar Atomic Power Station (KAPS) in Gujarat on the west coast of the subcontinent, tucked underneath the peninsula near Surat.
The company said cost of the replacement was $110 million, IANS reported. Chairman and Managing Director S.K. Sharma said NPCIL would “replace channels of both the units. The work is on the project mode.”
In March 11, 2016, Unit 1 at KAPS shut down due to a leakage of heavy water. The unit was also shut down in 1998 for more than two months due to a coolant loop leak.
The 2016 leak was quickly addressed and fixed within 10 days, but the unit has remained shut down. Unit 2 has been shut down since July 2015, IANS said, first shut down for a maintenance outage, but remaining shut after the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) revealed that coolant channels in the reactors were inflicted with corrosion spots.
The 220 MW units have 306 coolant channels. “In all 612 coolant channels in both the units will be changed,” said Station Director V.K.Jain, Station Director. The replacement project, he said, is expected to take around two and a half years. “First to go on stream would be the second unit and three or four months later, the first unit would start generating power,” he said.
Unit 1 and 2 are both Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors. They were commissioned in May 1993 and September 1995, respectively. NPCIL, meanwhile, is constructing two new units at the KAPS facility, two at the Rajasthan Atomic Power Plant (Units 7 and 8), and a second unit at Kudankulam, which attained first criticality in July 2016.
At Rajasthan, the two units are near completion with Unit 7 expected to attain criticality sometime this year and Unit 8 to follow sometime in 2018.