IAEA reviews Rooppur design safety documentation

Thursday, 26 July 2018

The IAEA's Technical Safety Review (TSR) service provides an independent evaluation of plant design safety and safety assessment documentation and is adapted to address the specific needs of a requesting Member State. TSR services encompass safety analyses for the design, licensing and operation of nuclear installations. The reviews address deterministic and probabilistic methods, as well as risk-informed decision-making approaches, and recommends improvements to safety. The services are based on the IAEA's Safety Standards and cover design safety, generic reactor safety, safety requirements and probabilistic safety assessment, as well as of accident management and period safety reviews.

The services aim at assisting plant operators and vendors, technical safety organisations and regulatory bodies in their technical evaluations, as well as in the development of requirements, and in enhancing nuclear safety for specific facilities.

At the request of the Bangladeshi government the IAEA has completed a Technical Safety Review - Design Safety (TSR-DS) review of the design documentation for the Rooppur plant. The team - comprising IAEA staff members and international senior experts - reviewed selected sub-chapters of the plant's Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR). The review focused on the methodology of accident analysis and its application to a selected design basis accident.

The TSR-DS team provided recommendations to further enhance the PSAR documentation focusing on accident analysis.

Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom signed an agreement in February 2011 for two 1000 MWe-class reactors to be built at Rooppur for the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC). The initial contract for the project, worth USD12.65 billion, was signed in December 2015. First concrete was poured for unit 1 in November last year, while that for unit 2 was poured earlier this month. Rooppur unit 1 is scheduled to begin operation in 2023, with unit 2 following in 2024.

The first VVER-1200 unit in operation - at Novovoronezh in Russia - entered commercial operation in February 2017.