On June 30, 2023, India’s first domestically built 700MW nuclear reactor kickstarted its commercial operations in the Kakrapar Atomic Power Project (KAPP) in Gujarat, a senior official said.
The Nuclear power plant is located in Surat. It is in close proximity to the Mandvi and Tapi Rivers.
“With great pleasure, this is to inform that our first indigenous 700MW, the KAPP-3, has become commercial on June 30, 2023, at 10 AM”, a senior KAPP official said.
Various commissioning activities were underway at KAPP-4, which achieved 96.92 per cent progress by the end of May 2023. The NPCIL is planning to build sixteen 700MW Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) across the country and has granted financial and administrative sanctions for the same
A PHWR is a nuclear power reactor which uses natural uranium as fuel and utilises heavy water (deuterium oxide) as a coolant and moderator. The PHWR reactors are the mainstay of India’s nuclear reactor fleet.
The 700 MW PHWR have advanced safety features such as Steel Lined Inner containment, passive decay heat removal system, containment spray system and hydrogen management system, among others. The KAPP-3 addresses the issue of excess thermal margins, Thermal margin refers to the extent to which the operating temperature of a reactor is below its maximum temperature.
The 700MW reactors are highly significant for India as these reactors will be the backbone of a new fleet of twelve reactors to which the government gave approval and financial sanction in 2017.
The 700MW PHWR design uses thin-walled pressured tubes instead of the large pressure vessels used in previous PHWR reactors. Four units of the 700MW reactors are currently at Kakrapar (KAPP-3 and KAPP-4) in Gujarat and Rawatbhata (RAPS-7 and RAPS-8)
The government has sanctioned the building of 10 indigenously developed PHWRs in fleet mode at four locations, namely Gorakhpur In Uttar Pradesh, Chutka in Madhya Pradesh, Banswara in Rajasthan and Kaiga in Karnataka. The construction of 700MW nuclear power plants is underway at Rawatbhata in Rajasthan and Gorakhpur Village (Haryana).
On July 22, 2020, The Kakrapar Nuclear reactor achieved its first criticality. A nuclear reactor is said to be critical when nuclear fuel inside the reactor can sustain a fission reaction. Fission is a process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more nuclei and some byproduct with the release of energy. Criticality is the first step towards power production.
The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) is building two 700MW pressurised heavy water reactors at Kakrapar, which is also home to two 220MW power plants. As of now, the nuclear power plant is operating at 90 per cent of its total power.
The Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) is an Indian Public Sector Undertaking headquartered in Mumbai. The Government of India wholly owns it and is responsible for the generation of nuclear power for electricity. The NPCIL is administered by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).
This is a landmark achievement of India, particularly the “Make In India” initiative launched by PM Narendra Modi who called the KAPP-3 a trailblazer after it reached criticality.
India is working to ramp up its existing nuclear power capacity of 6,780 MW to 22,480 MW by 2031. The 700MWe capacity would constitute the biggest component of this expansion plan.
The PHWR technology started in India in the late 1960s. The first PHWR was a product of Indo-Canadian nuclear cooperation. Canada had supplied most of the equipment required for building the reactor. Until now, the biggest reactor size of the indigenous design was the 540 MW PHWR.
Under the leadership of the Narendra Modi government and subsequent initiatives launched by him made India’s indigenous civil nuclear programme grow by leaps and bounds
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