Russia’s TVEL fuel company has signed a contract with Bulgaria’s Kozloduy NPP for fuel supplies until 2025.
Complete fuel assemblies, produced by the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrate Plant, will be supplied to Kozloduy 5&6, both VVER-1000 reactors.
Since the end of 2016, a new generation of fuel, TVSA-12, has been supplied to Kozloduy 6. The use of the highly efficient fuel allowed the Bulgarian power engineers to start testing the power unit at 104% of nominal power in 2017, and in April 2018 to officially switch to operating the plant at the higher power.
Bulgaria has long been under pressure for the European Union (EU) to diversify its fuel supplies and earlier this year asked Westinghouse Electric Sweden to provide technical and economic justification for the licensing and use of its improved nuclear fuel at the two-unit station. Kozloduy said at the time it was looking to comply with the Euratom Supply Agency’s strategy to guarantee the diversification and security of nuclear fuel supplies in the European Union because the fuel supply contract with Tvel was coming to an end.
Euratom approved the new contract after the Bulgarian Ministry of Energy and Kozloduy NPP committed to step-up fuel diversification efforts.
Photo: Kozloduy nuclear plant
