The Development of the Evolutionary BWR (AB1600)

Considering the delay of the first breeding reactor (FBR), it is expected that the light water reactor will still play the main role of the electric power generation in the 2030’s. Accordingly, Toshiba has been developing a new conceptual ABWR as the near-term BWR. We tentatively call it AB1600. The AB1600 has introduced the hybrid active/passive safety system in order to have independent countermeasure for severe accidents and better probability of core damage frequency (CDF) considered external events such as earthquake. On the other hand, we have another goal of the AB1600, which is to retain the safety performance superior or equivalent to the current ABWR without deterioration of economy. In order to achieve both economy and safety performance, we have optimized the safety system configuration of the AB1600 by partly introducing passive safety system to design basis event (DBEs). At the same time, we have adopted the simplification of the overall plant systems in order to improve economy. In order to reduce capital cost, to shorten refueling period and to reduce maintenance effort, the AB1600 introduces the large fuel bundle size. The bundle size is 1.2 times as large as that of the ABWR and the fuel rod array is 12 by 12. And then by progressing the core design, we can reduce the number of reactor internal pumps (RIPs) to eight from the current ABWR of ten. The core power density, the number of fuel bundles, and the core diameter of AB1600 are decided in order to achieve 24 months fuel cycle length on the condition with below 5wt% enrichment of fuel and with eight RIPs.Copyright © 2008 by ASME