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Sustainable Energy

UK Advanced Boiling Water Reactor

The UK ABWR – UK Advanced Boiling Water Reactor – is a nuclear reactor design which has been proposed for construction in the UK. The UK ABWR is being developed and offered in the UK by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd. (Hitachi-GE) – working in collaboration with Horizon Nuclear Power (a 100% owned Hitachi Subsidiary ).

Despite Hitachi’s decision in January 2019 to suspend our UK nuclear development programme, completion of the GDA process remains a significant step to enable deployment of UK ABWR technology here in the UK – and as such the detail contained within these pages remains relevant.

For information on the work of Horizon Nuclear Power and Hitachi’s overall engagement in the UK nuclear sector, please visit www.horizonnuclearpower.com.

Nuclear energy is highly regulated to ensure that the highest levels of safety, security and environmental protection are maintained at all times. For new nuclear build, the first stage of this is a rigorous assessment of the reactor design by UK regulators, known as Generic Design Assessment (GDA).

From April 2013 to December 2017, the UK ABWR was assessed under GDA by the Office for Nuclear regulation (ONR), Environment Agency (EA) and Natural Resources Wales (NRW).

Generic Design Assessment was successfully completed by Hitachi-GE on its original schedule, with the issue of a Design Acceptance Confirmation (DAC) from ONR, and a Statement of Design Acceptability (SoDA) from EA and NRW on 14th December 2017.

This website was developed to support public engagement during the GDA process. Through this site, Hitachi-GE published its regulatory submissions, as well as lay summaries of the reactor design.

These summaries – as well as the final regulatory submissions of the GDA process – remain available.

A key aspect of GDA is a comment process, enabling members of the public, organisations and institutions to make comments or ask questions about the technology and about our submissions made to the regulators. This website hosted that process from January 2014 to August 2017, receiving 83 comments throughout that time. A summary of those comments are available here.

Hitachi ABWR Video - Video based on a generic approach – individual site developments will be subject to site specific design
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