India gets uranium fuel from Russia

India has received the first consignment of uranium fuel from Russia for unit-1 of 1,000 MegaWatt Kudankulam Nuclear power project, a Nuclear Power Corporation of India spokesperson said on Monday.

 "KKNPP, comprising of two units of 1,000 MW  each, are at an advanced stage of completion in technical collaboration with the Russian federation and the low enriched uranium fuel for its first unit arrived at Kudankulam on Sunday," according to NPCIL spokesperson A I Siddiqui.

KKNPP is under construction at Kudankulam located in Radhapuram taluka of Tamil Nadu's Tirunelveli district. The project is set up through a bilateral agreement between the erstwhile USSR and India. "The life time fuel supply for Kudankulam reactors is covered through a sovereign guarantee of the Russian federation," Siddiqui said.

Under the Indo-Russian collaboration, India can reprocess the spent fuel from these reactors and all the activities at Kudankulam will be under International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguards, NPCIL said. The two KKNPP units belong to an advanced design of the VVER family, a pressurised light water reactor, constituting a majority of nuclear reactors in the world using LEU.

This kind of fuel is in use in VVER-1000 MW units in several countries around the world since 1980s and has given excellent performance, Siddiqui said.