Kudankulam Unit I power production in 20 days

The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) Unit-I is set to begin production in the next 20 days.

"The plant will start production in the next 15-20 days once it completes the trial run," said R S Sundar, plant's site director, and added experiments and tests were in progress.

According to an earlier plan, it was supposed to go on stream by the end of August, but missed the target due to a technical snag. Unit-I had achieved criticality on July 13. The second unit is expected to go on stream by June next year.

"Our focus is on fully commencing Unit-I, which is why progress on Unit-II is not that fast though a separate team is working on it. We expect it to go on stream by the end of June 2014," said Sundar.

Kudankulam is a 2,000 Mw project comprising Unit-I and II, each of which will generate 1,000 Mw power. Unit-I is set to be synchronised anytime now. Initially, it will generate 250 Mw power.

Another plan is to set up four more units of 1,000 Mw each. Once those are ready, the Kudankulam plant will have six reactors in all.

For commissioning the third and fourth units, talks between the governments of India and Russia are in the advanced stage.

"Hopefully, these two units will also take off in a year's time. Setting up a power plant, which generates 1Mw of power based on nuclear technology costs around Rs 8 crore," said Sundar.

At present, equipment, technology and expertise are mostly from outside India. But in the future project, 20 per cent of these will be indigenous, or localised.