European utility requirements: common rules to design next LWR plants in an open electricity market

Conference · Thu Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2004

OSTI ID:21160682

Berbey, Pierre ^[1]; Ingemarsson, Karl-Fredrik ^[2]

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1. Electricite de France / SEPTEN, 12 avenue Dutrievoz, 69100 Villeurbanne (France)
2. Vattenfall / Elproduktion Norden, Jaemtlandsgatan 99, 16287 Stockholm (Sweden)

The major European electricity producers want to keep able to build new nuclear power plants and they believe 3. generation LWRs would be the most adapted response to their needs in the first decades of this century. Producing a common European Utility Requirement (EUR) document has been one of the basic tasks towards this objective. In this common frame, standardized and competitive LWR NPPs could be developed and offered to the investors. This idea is now well supported by all the other actors on the European electricity market: vendors, regulators, grid managers, administrations although in the competitive and unified European electricity market that is emerging, the electricity producers' stakes are more and more different from the other electricity business actors'. The next term objectives of the electricity producers involved in EUR are focused on negotiating common rules of the game together with the regulators. This covers the nuclear safety approaches, the conditions requested to connect a plant to a HV grid, as well as the design standards. Discussions are going on between the EUR organization and all the corresponding bodies to develop stabilized and predictable design rules that would meet the constraints of nuclear electricity generation in this new environment. Finally there cannot be competition without competitors. The EUR organization has proven to be the right place to establish trustful relationship between the vendors and their potential customers, through fair assessment of the proposed designs performance vs. the utility needs. This will be continued and developed with the main vendors present in Europe, so as to keep alive a list of 4 to 6 designs 'qualified', i.e. showing an acceptable score of non-compliance vs. EUR. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 21160682
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
DESIGN
ELECTRICITY
MANAGEMENT
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
PERFORMANCE
POWER GENERATION
RADIATION PROTECTION