The forging of parts of the reactor pressure vessel for unit six of Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant – the second unit of the Paks II project – has begun in Russia.
Workers at the AEM-Spetsstal plant in St Petersburg – part of Rosatom’s Machine-Building Division – have begun forging a batch of blanks with a total weight of about 600 tonnes, from which elements of the reactor vessel will be produced. The rings that make up the reactor vessel and the bottom of the vessel are formed under a pressure of about 12,000 tonnes during forging. After the blanks have been given the required shape, the parts will be transferred to another part of the plant for mechanical processing.
The finished weight of the equipment will be nearly 330 tonnes, its height will be more than 11 metres, its diameter will be 4.5 metres, and its maximum wall thickness will be 285 millimeters.
“We have started work on manufacturing the ‘heart’ of the nuclear power plant – a generation III+ reactor – for another power unit in Hungary,” said Igor Kotov, head of Rosatom’s Machine-Building Division. “Russian metallurgists and machine builders have reached high rates of equipment production for the Paks II NPP. At the same time, blanks for reactors of power units 5 and 6 are in production, and in the future we will begin manufacturing steam generators, pressure compensators, safety system tanks and other products of the first circuit of the nuclear island of the plant, as well as the turbine hall. In order to ensure timely and high-quality production of NPP equipment, several of our enterprises will join the project at once: in Moscow, Podolsk, St Petersburg, Petrozavodsk and Volgodonsk.”
Vitaly Polyanin, Vice President of ASE JSC – Director of the Paks NPP Construction Project, added: “The implementation of the Paks II NPP project is on schedule. This is also evidenced by the fact that the production of long-cycle equipment – the reactor vessel of power unit 6 – began a year after a similar stage of production of the reactor vessel for unit 5 of the Paks NPP.”
Production of the first elements of the turbine for unit 5 has also begun at Arabelle Solutions in Belfort, France.
“The Paks II project is the largest and most advanced nuclear project in the European Union,” said Hungary’s Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó. “Its success is of critical importance for the long-term security of domestic energy supply. Due to the restrictive measures of the Biden administration, progress is more difficult than we would like, which is why it is of great significance that we have reached another important milestone.”
The Paks II project
The Paks plant, 100 kilometres south of Budapest, currently comprises four Russian-supplied VVER-440 pressurised water reactors, which started up between 1982 and 1987. An inter-governmental agreement was signed in early 2014 for Russian enterprises and their international sub-contractors to supply two VVER-1200 reactors at Paks as well as a Russian state loan of up to EUR10.0 billion (USD10.5 billion) to finance 80% of the project.
The construction licence application was submitted in July 2020, the construction licence was issued in August 2022 and a construction timetable agreed in 2023, including first concrete this year, with a target to connect the new units to the grid at the beginning of the 2030s.
Source: World Nuclear News
