TVEL Fuel Company of Rosatom has signed the contract for nuclear fuel supply to the future power units 7 and 8 of Tianwan NPP with Suneng Nuclear Power Corporation and China Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation acting as the customers (both companies are subsidiaries of China National Nuclear Corporation, CNNC).
The Contract signing ceremony took place in the presence of Alexey Likhachev, Rosatom Director General, and Zhang Kejian, Chairman of China Atomic Energy Authority (CAEA), at the 23rd session of Chinese-Russian Subcommittee on Nuclear Issues which was held on July 19, 2019, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s Volga region.
The Contract includes supplies for the first core as well as for further refueling, envisaging an option of payments in the national currencies of Russia and China – rubles and yuans. Rusatom Overseas coordinated the contract negotiations from the Russian side.
The two new Russian-design Gen 3+ units at Tianwan NPP will be powered by VVER-1200 reactors. At present, Tianwan NPP has four Russian-design power units with VVER-1000 running on nuclear fuel produced either by Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrate Plant (an enterprise of TVEL Fuel Company of Rosatom) or by Yibin fuel plant (Sichuan province, China), where fabrication of fuel assemblies for VVER-1000 is localized under TVEL license.
“Since the first unit commissioning at Tianwan NPP in 2006, TVEL has been not just supplying nuclear fuel to the customer, but also providing a comprehensive support introducing the best Russian practices. In particular, our engineers provided for switching the VVER-1000 units to the new generation TVS-2M fuel. We also helped to launch Russian-design nuclear fuel fabrication at Yibin plant. The start of VVER-1200 fuel supplies to China marks a new milestone in the history of our relationship that has good prospects for further development and on a mutually beneficial basis,” commented Oleg Grigoriyev, Senior Vice President for Commerce and International Business at TVEL.
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TVEL Fuel Company of Rosatom incorporates enterprises for the fabrication of nuclear fuel, conversion and enrichment of uranium, production of gas centrifuges, as well as research and design organizations. It is the only supplier of nuclear fuel for Russian nuclear power plants. TVEL Fuel Company of Rosatom provides nuclear fuel for 76 power reactors in 15 countries worldwide, research reactors in eight countries, as well as transport reactors of the Russian nuclear fleet. Every sixth power reactor in the world operates on fuel manufactured by TVEL. www.tvel.ru