Pabna: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Deputy Prime Minister of Russian Federation YuryIvanovich Borisovon Saturday jointly inaugurated the construction of the second reactor unit of Rooppur nuclear power plant here.

Both the leaders poured concrete at a programme here on the occasion of the first concrete pouring of the second unit of Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, reports the UNB.

The construction of the first reactor unit began on November 30, 2017.Currently the works on construction of the walls, reinforcement of the reactor building and the foundation slab of the auxiliary reactor building are being performed, while soil stabilization works for the evaporative cooling tower and others have already been commenced.

Two units — 1,200 MWe VVER each — are to be built at Rooppur under the Russian design giving priority to the highest safety measures at Rooppur, some 160km from Dhaka. The VVER-1,200 reactor design has already been implemented at Novovoronezh Nuclear Power Plant II in Russia.

Unit-1 is scheduled to be commissioned in 2023, while the commissioning of the second unit is slated for 2024 to produce 2,400 megawatts of electricity from the two units.

In February 2011, Rosatom, the state atomic energy corporation of the Russian Federation, signed an agreement with the Bangladesh government to build the nuke plant at Rooppur.

The initial contract for the project, worth $12.65 billion, was inked in December, 2015.

The Rooppur NPP construction is performed based on the Russia-Bangladesh Intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the area of NPP construction in the territory of Bangladesh, signed on November 2, 2011.

On December 25, 2015 General Contract for designing, construction and commissioning of 2 NPP power units each of 1200 Mwe capacity and based on VVER-reactors was signed in Dhaka.