The Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant has at last reached the long-awaited stage of fission, the nuclear reaction. With this the first nuclear power plant in the country’s history has passed all its technical stages and moved to the final phase.
Dr Md Zahedul Hasan, a nuclear scientist and managing director of the Nuclear Power Plant Company, said on Sunday that the reaction formally began at 3:30pm that day and would now proceed gradually.
Asked when electricity would be added to the national grid, he said that could not be said yet. It will go on like this for the next few days and move gradually towards generating power. Another approval will be needed before electricity is supplied to the national grid.
Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant, the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant (RNPP), is being built on the bank of the Padma in Ishwardi upazila, Pabna. The project is being carried out under the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission with the technical assistance of Russia’s state company Rosatom. The plant has two units with a capacity of 1,200MW each. Built with Russian VVER-1200 technology, it has a total capacity of 2,400MW. The construction cost was initially put at $12.65 billion.
In January 2026 the cost was raised by Tk 25,592 crore and a total of about Tk 139,000 crore was approved.
About 90% of the project’s cost is covered by a Russian loan and the rest by Bangladesh. Main construction began on 30 November 2017; the foundation stone had been laid in 2013. The project’s term has already been extended at least four times.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report