Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, a booster for economic growth in Bangladesh
First unit of Rooppur Nuclear Plant to be ready for power generation early next year
By Anwar A. Khan
Bangladesh is pushing ahead with plans to boost the country’s nuclear power to meet its growing energy needs and reduce its carbon footprint under the able and dynamic leadership of PM Sheikh Hasina.
Electricity, Industry and Development are complementary to each other and imperative for a country’s economic growth. So far, power generation in Bangladesh has been struggling to keep pace with the increasing energy demand. In order to keep its growth engine revving, Bangladesh signed up for setting up its first 2,400 MW Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant in Pabna.
The Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant (RNPP) will be an important driver of social and economic development of Bangladesh. It will generate low-cost electricity and provide employment opportunities and revenues from taxes, which will help to support a healthy economy. The RNPP has a very large generation capacity over a longer service life, with a service life of main equipment of 60 years without necessity of its replacement. Low operational and maintenance cost adds to the benefits from economic perspective.
The power plant will play a vital role in reducing the unit cost of electricity production in the country as well as reducing the dependence on fossil fuels like gas-oil-coal for power production, which will simultaneously protect the country’s natural resources, and enhance Bangladesh’s energy security and prevent environmental pollution associated with fossil fuels.
Experts are unanimous in their opinion that nuclear power is the panacea for Bangladesh’s energy starved industrial sector and its economic woes.
Bangladesh not only need power for its industrial sector but also for agriculture and its growing Ready-made Garments (RMG) sector that is the source of livelihood for millions of its citizens. The country has realised that providing power to sectors like agriculture (especially in irrigation) with priority basis has yielded rich dividends as Bangladesh that used to spend more than 1 billion USD in importing rice before 2010 is now steadily moving towards becoming a rice exporter. RMG sector is also heavily dependent on power and providing electricity to it on a priority basis has ensured its further expansion.
The country’s green energy sector is set to get a boost from the country’s target of achieving carbon neutrality from 36 MtCO2e to 89.47 MtCO2e by 2030 compared to business as usual, giving the drive to transition to cleaner forms of energy a new impetus. However, it is not small task by any stretch of imagination, requiring massive efforts both on policy and regulatory fronts and an enormous amount of financing to put plans into action.
But the clean energy sector will most definitely see a push, considering the ever-growing energy requirements. The net-zero target is going to transform how the country produces and consumes energy.
The country’s energy needs are set to grow rapidly over the coming years amid an expanding economy and increasing urbanisation that has created an enormous challenge for Bangladesh to balance its appetite for energy with environmental concerns. This dilemma, in the past, has led to hesitance from Bangladesh’s policymakers to put a firm target for carbon neutrality, despite mounting pressure from other countries to do so.
However, all preparations are now over. Uranium fuel of Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, the country’s largest mega project, will arrive in the country by September 28, 2023. It will be handed over through the in-person presence of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and virtual presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 5, 2023.
Nuclear power will help provide the electricity that our growing economy needs without increasing emissions. This is truly an environmentally responsible source of energy.
Nuclear power is the second largest source of clean energy after hydropower. The energy to mine and refine the uranium that fuels nuclear power and manufacture the concrete and metal to build nuclear power plants is usually supplied by fossil fuels, resulting in CO2 emissions; however, nuclear plants do not emit any CO2 or air pollution as they operate.
And despite their fossil fuel consumption, their carbon footprints are almost as low as those of renewable energy. One study calculated that a kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity has a carbon footprint of 4 grams of CO2 equivalent, compared to 4 grams for wind and 6 grams for solar energy — versus 109 grams for coal, even with carbon capture and storage.
In the last 50 years, nuclear energy has precluded the creation of 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide, according to the International Energy Agency. Without nuclear energy, the power it generated would have been supplied by fossil fuels, which would have increased carbon emissions and resulted in air pollution that could have caused millions more deaths each year.
Many of the new nuclear plant designs that are in advanced planning stages, under construction, or being researched in North America, Europe, Japan, Russia and China address the main challenges of nuclear energy. They incorporate improvements in safety and cost, as well as in reliability, proliferation resistance and waste reduction.
The US$12.65 billion nuclear power plant project at Rooppur of Ishwardi upazila in Pabna District, on the bank of the river Padma, 87 miles (140 km) west of Dhaka is being constructed by the Russian Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation with a Russian loan amounting to US$11.38 billion, with repayments commencing 10 years after operation, with the rest financed by the Bangladesh government.
The Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant will be a 2.4 GWe nuclear power plant in Bangladesh with an over 90% utilization factor, the power plant is expected to generate 19 billion kWh annually.
The Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS) mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visited the plant at various stages of construction, and has generally been satisfied with progress.
It will be the country’s first nuclear power plant, and the first of the two units is expected to go into operation in 2024. In the main construction period, the total number of employees will reach 12,500, including 2,500 specialists from Russia. It is expected to generate around 15% of the country’s electricity when completed.
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Generating electricity from fusion power remains the focus of international research.
While its radioactivity decreases exponentially it must be isolated from the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, though newer technologies (like fast reactors) have the potential to reduce this significantly. Because the spent fuel is still mostly fissionable material, some countries (e.g., France and Russia) reprocess their spent fuel by extracting fissile and fertile elements for fabrication in new fuel, although this process is more expensive than producing new fuel from mined uranium. All reactors breed some plutonium-239, which is found in the spent fuel, and because Pu-239 is the preferred material for nuclear weapons, reprocessing is seen as a weapon proliferation risk.
Nuclear has some incredible pluses,” Bill Gates said. “It’s not weather dependent, you can build a plant, but the amount of energy coming out of a very small plant is gigantic.”
To meet climate change goals, almost all electricity will need to be low carbon, and that will only be possible if the use of nuclear power is increased, said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi at the opening of the 2020 Scientific Forum. “It will require us to make use of all energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is part of the solution.”
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Views expressed are personal and IAR neither approves nor is responsible for the same.
