Kozloduy seeks uprate approval

Friday, 6 January 2012 Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant has notified the country's Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRA) about its plans to increase the generating capacity of units 5 and 6 by a combined 120 MWe (gross), Bloomberg reported. The uprate would require a licensing change, according to NRA's president, Sergei Tsochev. He said that the agency would be able to issue a new licence to the plant by the end of 2013, provided that it was supplied with all the necessary documents in time. Tsochev noted that the Kozloduy plant will also need to seek approval to extend the operating lives of the two Russian-supplied VVER-1000 units four years before their current licences are due to expire, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In June 2011, Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borissov said that the country will seek to extend the reactors' operation by ten years. "To allow a service life extension, we need to examine the aging of the reactors and to have part of the equipment replaced," Tsochev said.