Concreting of the cooling tower at the first unit of the Kursk II nuclear power plant in western Russia has started. At a height of 179 metres, the structure will be the tallest cooling tower in Russia. It is expected to be fully completed by 2024.

Alexey Buldygin, head of construction for the project, said concreting of 65 of the the tower's 115 tiers will be completed by the end of this year. This will raise the structure to a height of 105m.

Concreting the entire shell of the cooling tower will require about 14,000 cubic meters of concrete. Up to the fifth tier, the concrete mix will be supplied using pumps, and for subsequent tiers a crane mounted in the centre of the cooling tower will be used.

Work on the construction of the cooling tower began at the end of 2019. This involved the installation of 100 columns and the concreting of the supporting base.

Kursk II will be the first to use the VVER-TOI (typical optimised, with enhanced information) reactor design.