Hitachi ABWR

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The Hitachi Advanced Boiling Water Reactor is a boiling water nuclear reactor marketed by a consortium of Hitachi and General Electric (GE) based on a design originally by GE developed in collaboration with Hitachi and Toshiba. Toshiba-GE and GE itself offer other variations of the design.

Advanced Boiling Water Reactor Wikipedia

The Hitachi Advanced Boiling Water Reactor Euan Mearns / Andy Dawson; Energy Matters; 5 Jan 2018

Horizon Nuclear Power, a subsidiary of Japan’s Hitachi, has proposed to build advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) at Wylfa on the Isle of Anglesey, N Wales and potentially at Oldbury too. The design, similar to the reactors destroyed at Fukushima, has just passed the UK general design acceptance process, clearing the way hopefully for construction to begin in the near future. In this guest post, Andy Dawson reviews the ABWR design concept, once again focussing on safety systems.

On the 14th of December the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (the ONR) announced that the UK-Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) design submitted by Horizon Nuclear Power had successfully completed the UK general design assessment (GDA) process. While this isn’t the end of the regulatory process for the UK-ABWR (it still needs site level permits for Wylfa and potentially Oldbury), it does mean that the overwhelming majority of design issues have been signed off.

Nor does it mean that funding is in place, or that the construction of UK-ABWRs is a done deal. That remains an issue for the (hopefully near) future.

It does make this a good moment, however, to review the design; the changes and developments to the baseline design that were required to pass GDA may throw some light on the challenges faced by designs following UK-ABWR into GDA. We’ll look initially into the basic design of BWRs (including some aspects of its evolution), then the ABWR itself, and then the specific changes needed for GDA.