ArmInfo.At the Armenian NPP (ANPP) one of the most important activities of outage-2021 has started. The joint efforts of the specialists of "NVAER" company (a branch of JSC) engaged by JSC, and of the Armenian NPP were directed towards the recovery of physical-mechanical properties of the reactor vessel metal.
As the press service of the ANPP reports, for this purpose, the annealing facility was hoisted down into the reactor vessel, and the very process of thermal treatment started, and it will last approximately 14 days. The annealing activities are implemented under the designer's supervision of the SRC representatives.
The reactor vessel is the "heart" of the unit, and it is its lifetime that defines the service life of the plant. The annealing will securely contribute to the Unit 2 lifetime extension and its safety improvement. For the first time, the annealing technology was applied in 1987 at the third power unit of the Novovoronezh NPP. Reduction annealing has already been carried out at VVER-440 reactors of such nuclear power plants as Kola NPP (Russia), Rovno NPP (Ukraine), Kozloduy NPP (Bulgaria) and Loviisa NPP (Finland).
