A comeback of the boiling water reactor line?

New power plant lines are not necessarily developed because of an urgent need for baseload power plants. Instead, vendors. operators, and regulatory and licensing authorities want to preserve nuclear know-how. Only in this way can operators meet their obligation to adapt their plants to the current state of the art over the entire service lives of those plants. This is one of the reasons why Siemens looked for an advanced development on the basis of the former KWU boiling water reactors, the SWR 1000. Know-how about the pressurized water reactor line is preserved by the development of the EPR jointly with Framatome, the French-German joint development being based strongly on the convoy line by Siemens. The SWR development, fur which Siemens, in the very last days uf the old German Federal Government, filed for an examination ascertaining that the plant melt the considerably tighter German licensing preconditions since 1994, bases safety chiefly on the use of passive components. As a consequence of this philosophy, the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel will be prevented from melting entirely without any active measures even in the assumed case of a core meltdown. After the onset of an accident, more than three days are available for human intervention. This advanced development of the boiling water reactor line stands a good chance to succeed also with respect to economic performance. Unlike the EPR, whose economic viability vis-a-vis competing coal and gas Bred power plants is to be achieved mainly through an increase in the installed unit capacity, the SWR 1000 is likely, even at the planned unit size of approx. 1000 MW, to generate electricity competitively with gas and steam power plants, so-called combined-cycle plants.