Collection of nuclear organizations warn NRC over reactor review, regulation

The Nuclear Energy Institute, Nuclear Innovation Alliance, and U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council have all written to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), warning them that their regulation of new and innovative advanced reactors require streamlining.

They wrote a joint letter noting their concerns back in January, but this week, the NEI followed this with a paper titled, “Recommendations for Enhancing the Safety Focus of New Reactor Regulatory Reviews.” In that report, they observed that licensing of these reactor designs need to be tailored to account for the safety characteristics of those individual designs.

“NRC reviews of these safer designs have not evolved to become more efficient. Inefficiencies only unnecessarily lengthen the NRC review time and cost … and the amount of information licensees must maintain over the life of the plant,” NEI said.

Their paper assessed what has been learned from the industry’s interactions with the NRC on reviews of new reactor projects. It looked at those reviews and provided recommendations for more effectively adapting those reviews to account for benefits of safer designs. They called for focusing on safety-significant areas and reversing a trend toward increased detail. Failing to do so, they concluded, would lead to discouragement among U.S. advanced nuclear developers and lead to less safe reactor designs in the long term — a fact that could also threaten U.S. technology innovation.

The NRC’s regulations, in the view of the NEI, tended to go beyond standards needed for reasonable assurance of safety, and that costs have been going up as a result.