Nuclear Energy Institute comments on accident-tolerant fuel deployment goals

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) recently sent a comment letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the industry’s path forward to full accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) deployment.

The plan referenced by NEI aims for phased deployment in a commercial reactor in the early to mid-2020s.

“This schedule is of key importance in the decisions our members will need to make when evaluating the ATF safety benefits against the costs of adopting this technology,” NEI Technical Advisor Andrew Mauer said in a Feb. 5 comment letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission published a draft project plan outlining the NRC’s preliminary strategy to prepare for ATF license applications for comment in December 2017.

In its comment letter, NEI said that the industry finds many aspects of the draft plan commendable but that “a more transformational shift in the NRC’s fuel licensing approach is needed.” NEI suggested that NRC should leverage the Department of Energy’s (DOE) existing advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) capacity which did not exist twenty years ago.

Three concepts for advanced fuels are currently under development and qualification with three fuel vendors with funding from DOE: Framatome, General Electric’s subsidiary Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF) and Westinghouse. A fourth vendor, Lightbridge, is developing an advanced metallic fuel concept with potential accident tolerant characteristics but is not using DOE research funding.

Southern Nuclear Co. and GNF recently announced that they will load the first test rods into Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Hatch during the plant’s spring refueling outage early this year. The test rods will use two GNF technologies, one with an iron-chromium-aluminum fuel cladding material and the other using a ceramic-coated zirconium cladding.

“Accident tolerant fuel technology offers superior safety margin to address a beyond design basis event and the potential for more cost-effective operation of the existing boiling water reactor fleet,” GNF CEO Amir Vexler said. “We are excited to collaborate with our customers and partners on this important program to lead the industry to an even safer, more reliable and more efficient future.”