The first is the Westinghouse AP1000 design. Westinghouse is the 'grand dame' of nuclear plants in the US. The core is something lifted out of a nuclear submarine (in spirit only). It uses 'power grade' enriched uranium, which is about 4% of the good stuff, U235. In contrast, our plants have used 'natural' uranium at about 1% hot stuff. AECL is now using the euphemistically called 'slightly enriched' uranium, at about 2%.
WH has been bought out totally by Toshiba, so there is some good Japanese heavy metal behind it. We can't really hold the total political failure in Japan against them. The advantage of the AP design is that it uses pressurized 'light' water, which makes it very compact. In fact, everything else dwarfs the tiny reactor.
In China, they are putting 4 units at one site, which is probably what they want for the Darlington postage stamp, or the Bruce Caves. I'm still looking through the NRC documentation for the site layout, or some idea of the Chinese layout, since I don't believe this design can share facilities.I still don't know if I'm going to continue this series, but if I do, I'll look next at their seismic requirements, and superimpose the plant on the Darlington site.
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This line in the Wiki article caught my attention;
"The safety systems apply passive protection, which is designed to yield such high degree of safety that there is no need for the usual diesel generators,[citation needed] which provide the equipment with power in the case of a loss of electrical supply."
So they will forego the cost of said generators and not install any??
They have backup generators for control power, but they don't need the huge monsters to run the pumps. Pickering is now trying to build a huge monster, and it's a nightmare.
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