GE BWR

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "GE BWR" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

General Electric's BWR product line of boiling water reactors represents the designs of a relatively large (~18%)^[1] percentage of the commercial fission reactors around the world.

The progenitor of the BWR line was the 5 MW Vallecitos Boiling Water Reactor (VBWR), brought online in October 1957. Six design iterations, BWR-1 through BWR-6, were introduced between 1955 and 1972.

This was followed by the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) introduced in the 1990s and the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) introduced in the early 2010s.

As of August 2018, 83 reactors of this design family have been built, of which 67 reactors are operational^{[citation needed]}.

The design garnered world attention in the aftermath of the INES level 7 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011. GE had been a major contractor to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, which consisted of six boiling water reactors of GE design. The reactors for Units 1, 2, and 6 were supplied by General Electric, the other three by Toshiba and Hitachi. Unit 1 was a 460 MW boiling water reactor from the BWR-3 design iteration introduced in 1965 and constructed in July 1967.

After the plant became severely damaged in the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, loss of reactor core cooling led to three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions, and the release of radioactive contamination in Units 1, 2 and 3 between 12 and 15 March. Safe operation of this reactor design family depends on continued coolant flow at all times during operation. A reactor after a full-power shutdown may require active cooling of decay heat from long-lived radioactive isotopes for a year or more.