Construction of reactor vessel VVER-1200: three years in five minutes

The company Atomenergomash has posted a video on its Facebook page showing the process of construction of a reactor vessel VVER-1200.

It takes 36 months to build a reactor vessel, but the video demonstrates the main stages of the process in just five minutes.

A reactor vessel of the VVER-1200 type was manufactured for the first power-generating unit of the Belarusian nuclear power plant (BelNPP) that is currently under construction. The reactor vessel for the first power-generating unit was delivered to the construction site of the BelNPP on 24 December 2015. The piece of equipment weighs over 330 tonnes. It is 13-meter high, with the diameter as large as 4.5 meters. The manufacturing of the reactor vessel for the second power-generating unit continues. It is expected to be delivered to Belarus in 2017.

On the whole, AEM Technologies (part of Atomenergomash, which is the mechanical engineering division of the Russian state corporation Rosatom) will make over 50 kinds of equipment for the Belarusian nuclear power plant. The BelNPP is a project to build an AES-2006 type nuclear power plant 18km away from Ostrovets, Grodno
Oblast. The Belarusian nuclear power plant will have two power-generating units with the total output capacity of up to 2,400MW (2x1,200MW). The first power-generating unit is scheduled for commissioning in 2018, with the second one to go online in 2020.