1 Feb (NucNet): Bangladesh plans to produce 9% of its electricity from nuclear power and reduce its dependence on fossil fuels by the middle of the next decade when both reactors of a new nuclear station under construction at Rooppur will have gone into operation, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.
The agency said authorities in Bangladesh presented in Vienna this week their progress towards nuclear power at a technical meeting with participants from 40 IAEA member states.
“By 2040 we estimate that Bangladesh will need to generate about 78,000 megawatts of electricity in a high-demand scenario and about 69,000 in a low one, and nuclear power will play a significant role,” said Mohammad Shawkat Akbar, project director of the nuclear power station construction project and managing director of Nuclear Power Plant Company Bangladesh Limited, an enterprise of the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission.
This, Mr Akbar said, is according to a revised energy plan for Bangladesh from 2016.
“We are confident that the first Rooppur unit will be commissioned in 2023 and the second in 2024,” he said.
The nuclear station, being built about 160km northwest of the capital Dhaka, will have the capacity to generate 2,400 MW of electricity. Two 1,200-MW V-392M pressurised water reactor units are being built, a reactor design that has already been used at Novovoronezh 2-1 in Russia.
The construction project is being implemented by a subsidiary of Russia’s state atomic energy corporation Rosatom.
The IAEA said Bangladesh is expected to be one of the countries to suffer the most from climate change. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change anticipates that sea level rises from climate change are expected to subsume a large portion of its coastal land by 2080.
The government has designed several national policies and actions to adapt to this threat. These focus on food security and health, and also on energy security — an area where the construction of the nuclear power plant in Rooppur, which is not in coastal land, is expected to help.
