Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
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Prioritisation process announced for Generic Design Assessment
The Government today announced the start of a prioritisation process to select no more than three nuclear reactor designs to proceed to the next stage of Generic Design Assessment (GDA).
The objective of this is to allow the nuclear regulators to focus their resources on those designs which are most capable of being licensed and operational in the UK within a 2016-2022 timeframe.
The nuclear regulators, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Environment Agency (EA), recently announced the findings from the first step of GDA carried out on the four eligible designs submitted for new nuclear power stations. They found no shortfalls at this stage - in terms of safety, security or the environment - that would prevent any of them from ultimately being constructed on licensed sites in the UK.
The next steps of GDA encompass the majority of the detailed assessment work on the designs and is expected to run until 2011. As all four designs - from AECL, Areva, GE-Hitachi and Toshiba Westinghouse - are eligible for next step of GDA, the Department for Business and Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has started a process to recommend to the regulators which three designs should proceed to the later stages of GDA. The details of this process were included in the recent White Paper on Nuclear Power.
In support of this process 'credible nuclear power operators' (as defined in the White Paper) are being invited to nominate a maximum of three designs they wish to support in the later steps of GDA, and to rank the designs according to their preference for deployment. Operators are being requested to give reasons for their nominations and rankings. This is to ensure that those designs that have the greatest chance of being built in this country by a future operator are prioritised.
In addition, the vendors of the four reactor designs have been asked for evidence to support their design through the prioritisation process.
Eligible reactor design vendors and credible nuclear power operators will have until Wednesday 9 April 2008 to submit the information.
Following this, the Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise and Regulatory Reform will make recommendations to HSE and Environment Agency on the designs that should be given the highest priority for progressing to the next steps of GDA. This will take place by the end of April 2008.
Notes for editors
1. The Nuclear White Paper Meeting the Energy Challenge: A White Paper on Nuclear Power can be found at: http://www.berr.gov.uk/energy/nuclear-whitepaper/page42765.html.
2. Generic Design Assessment (GDA) is a process intended to ensure that the safety, security and environmental implications of new nuclear power station design issues are assessed before an application is made to build that design at a particular site.
3. GDA is a process undertaken by the regulators - Environment Agency and the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and Office of Civil Nuclear Security of the Health and Safety Executive - which commenced in August 2007.
4. The regulators have published a series of reports on their findings so far which can be viewed at http://www.hse.gov.uk/newreactors
5. The four designs subject to the initial assessment were:
* AECL - for its ACR 1000 design
* Areva - for its EPR
design
* GE-Hitachi - for its ESBWR design
*
Toshiba-Westinghouse Electric Company - for its AP1000 design
6. The Nuclear White Paper stated that because the later stages of GDA will be more demanding on the regulators' resources, it is unlikely that more than three designs can be assessed concurrently within the overall GDA timeframe of 3 to 31/2 years. Therefore if all four designs accepted for the first step successfully proceed through this step, a prioritisation process will be needed to select the three designs to proceed to the next stage. Details of the prioritisation process can be found in paragraphs 3.37-3.45 of the Nuclear White Paper
7. A credible nuclear power operator is one which:
* Currently operates a nuclear power plant anywhere in the world; and
* Currently operates an electricity generating station subject to UK health, safety and environmental regulation, or which has made a public commitment to become an operator of an electricity generating station (with a capacity in excess of 50MW) by 2016-2022 in a market subject to UK health, safety and environmental regulation.
8. Information from credible nuclear power operators should be submitted to: Michael Sugden, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Bay 127, 1 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0ET or e-mail michael.sugden@berr.gsi.gov.uk
9. The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform helps UK business succeed in an increasingly competitive world. It promotes business growth and a strong enterprise economy, leads the better regulation agenda and champions free and fair markets. It is the shareholder in a number of Government-owned assets and it works to secure, clean and competitively priced energy supplies.
