Equipment crucial for the safety of power unit No. 3 has been delivered to the Akkuyu NPP under construction. This refers to a set of hydro-tanks for the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS), TASS reported, citing the press service of Akkuyu Nuclear.
The cargo arrived at the station's "Vostochny" terminal. The shipment included four hydro-tanks with a total weight of over 300 tons. The equipment was manufactured at the Izhora plant in St. Petersburg, which is part of Rosatom's machine-building division.
The ECCS is considered one of the most important safety systems of a nuclear power plant. In case of an emergency, it automatically injects a boric acid solution into the reactor, which reduces the temperature of the core and simultaneously absorbs neutrons, slowing down the reaction. The volume of the solution exceeds the volume of the reactor, which allows cooling to be maintained even before the active pumps are started.
In fact, it is a passive protection system capable of operating without operator intervention and external power supply in the first critical minutes after an emergency scenario. Such technologies are used in modern Generation III+ reactors, including Russian VVER-1200s.
For the Akkuyu project, this delivery means a transition to one of the most sensitive stages of equipping Unit 3. Previously, similar systems had already been installed on the first power units of the station.
Earlier, it became known that Rosatom is expanding Turkish participation in nuclear projects: contractors from Akkuyu NPP are planned to be sent to Hungary for the Paks-2 NPP project. This was stated by the head of the state corporation, Alexey Likhachev. According to him, this primarily concerns contractors who have already gained experience working on the Akkuyu NPP project.
For Turkey, participation in Paks-2 could be the first case of exporting its own experience in nuclear construction. Before Akkuyu, the country practically had no independent school of civil nuclear engineering. Now, Turkish contractors have the opportunity to enter the international market through Rosatom's projects.
The Paks-2 project involves the construction of two power units with VVER-1200 reactors. This same technology is used at Akkuyu and a number of other foreign facilities of the Russian state corporation. Against the backdrop of rising costs and construction times for NPPs in Europe, Rosatom is relying on already trained teams and the unification of processes between projects.
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