AREVA's U.S. EPR™ Design: the Path of Greatest Certainty

The EPR™ technology is a mature,
evolutionary Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) design based on construction and operating experience at existing nuclear energy facilities in the U.S., France, Germany, China, and other countries. Components have been simplified and considerable emphasis has been placed on reactor safety. The EPR™ design has a familiar four-loop configuration with four reactor cooling pumps and four steam generators. Because the primary system design is similar to the current generation of PWRs, components have a history of proven operation. With higher total output and a simplified design, the EPR™ design also has less equipment and fewer components per megawatt of power output than current PWRs.

The U.S. EPR™ technology is the most economically competitive of the proposed new reactor designs due to

• minimized outage length, to increase availability
• reduced maintenance requirements
• fuel design to require less uranium
• fuel design to allow MOX fuel use
• improved plant efficiency
• reduced radwaste
• its higher availability factors and its large 1600 MWe output, resulting in lower generation costs per MWe.

The U.S. EPR™ puts safety as a priority:

• double containment of reactor building
• four-train redundant safety systems housed in separate buildings
• reactor containment is designed to confine all solid, liquid and gaseous products of a damaged core
• reduced operator actions following accidents and transients
• both military and commercial airplane crash protection

For more information about worldwide EPR™ projects, click here.