IAEA chief in India, to tour Rajasthan Atomic Power Plant

New Delhi: IAEA director general Yukiya Amano will be visiting India on Friday and is expected to make a tour of the Rajasthan Atomic Power Plant (RAPS) here.

Amano, the chief of the world's nuclear watchdog agency, will hold talks with the officials of the Ministry of External Affairs and Department of Atomic Energy and is expected to review the progress made on the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Incidentally, India had last year ratified IAEA's Additional Protocol and also brought 22 nuclear facilities, including 14 atomic power reactors, under the agency's safeguards, enabling it to have greater role in inspection of these units.

The last of two such reactors -- Narora Atomic Power Plant (NAPS) units 1 and 2 -- went under IAEA's safeguard in December, 2014.

Amano's visit comes barely days after India hosted an international conference on the Indian Nuclear Insurance Pool (INIP) to brief and apprise its global partners of the setting up of the fund as a part of the overall risk-management scheme for liability.

Apart from several atomic experts from the country, which includes officials of Nuclear Controls & Planning Wing (NCPW) of DAE, Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI) and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), representatives from various countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and Russia were present during the workshop.

Representatives of IAEA, too, attended the conference.

Amano is expected to visit RAPS Unit 5 at Rawatbhata, which has created a record with continuous run of 765 days at its full capacity of 220 MWe.

This is the second-highest operating record after a unit (500-MWe) of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Canada, which had a continuous run of 894 days that ended in 1994.

Amano had also visited India in 2011 and 2013.