VVER
series of pressurised water reactor designs
The water-water energetic reactor (WWER), or VVER (from Russian: водо-водяной энергетический реактор (ВВЭР), romanized: vodo-vodyanoi enyergeticheskiy reaktor) is a series of pressurized water reactor designs developed in the Soviet Union and Russia by OKB Gidropress. The name refers to the use of water as both the nuclear coolant and the neutron moderator, in a reactor intended for energy generation.
The idea of such a reactor was proposed at the Kurchatov Institute by Savely Moiseevich Feinberg. The first prototype VVER-210 was built at the Novovoronezh Nuclear Power Plant before the 1970s, as one of two initial Soviet reactor designs (the other being the RBMK). There have been several subsequent generations of VVER design, so the name is associated with substantially different reactors from original generation I to modern generation III+ designs. Electrical power output ranges from 70 to 1300 MWe, with designs of up to 1700 MWe currently in development.
VVER power stations have been installed in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, India, and Iran. Countries that are planning to introduce VVER reactors include Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Germany shut down its older generation VVER reactors in 1989-90, and cancelled those under construction.
History
The earliest VVERs were built before 1970.
“VVER” enters the record as series of pressurised water reactor designs. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what VVER, series and pressurised can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q35957. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1300, 1700, 1989 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “VVER” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.