Nuclear regulatory businesses from the U.S., Canada, and the UK will collaborate on technical opinions and share finest practices for superior reactors and small modular reactor (SMR) applied sciences. The measure is aimed toward enhancing regulatory effectivity and effectiveness as extra reactor applied sciences search approval within the three international locations.
A trilateral memorandum of cooperation (MOC) signed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Fee (NRC), the Canadian Nuclear Security Fee (CNSC), and the UK’s Workplace of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) on March 13 will deal with growing shared technical evaluate approaches “that facilitate decision of widespread technical inquiries to facilitate regulatory opinions” that tackle every nation’s nationwide laws.
The MOC additionally calls on all three international locations to collaborate on pre-application actions to “guarantee mutual preparedness to effectively evaluate superior reactor and SMR designs.” As well as, the MOC requires collaborations on analysis, coaching, and within the growth of regulatory approaches to deal with distinctive and novel technical concerns for making certain the protection of superior reactors and SMRs.
The MOC will supersede earlier bilateral agreements between the entities. These embody separate memoranda of understanding (MOU) for cooperation and trade of data “in nuclear regulatory issues” between the NRC and the CNSC, signed in March 2023; an MOU between the NRC and the ONR, signed in October 2020, and an MOU between the CNSC and the ONR, signed in October 2020. It additionally supersedes the NRC and CNSC’s MOCs on superior reactors and SMRs signed on August 2019, and related MOCs signed by the ONR and CNSC, signed on October 2020.
All three international locations have been getting ready for a ramp-up in superior reactor licensing. Whereas the UK in January issued an Different Routes to Market Session as a part of its “smarter regulation problem,” a civil nuclear roadmap calls upon ONR to start streamlining its nuclear reactor design evaluation and licensing processes for extra effectivity. As well as, ONR and an environmental counterpart will publish steering to the Generic Design Evaluation (GDA)—a non-mandatory regulatory course of—“requesting events on the best way to maximize using abroad regulatory evaluation and expectations for shifting from a two-step GDA to licensing and allowing.”
Final week, in the meantime, the NRC directed its workers to publish a proposed rule and draft steering to create Half 53, a much-awaited risk-informed and technology-inclusive licensing framework geared towards superior applied sciences, together with non-light-water-reactors (non-LWRs). All U.S. Superior reactor builders—reminiscent of Kairos, X-energy, TerraPower, and Abilene Christian College—are at the moment pursuing demonstration tasks below Half 50.
“This settlement reveals the good progress we’ve made with our worldwide counterparts to make sure superior reactor know-how may be safely and effectively deployed,” stated NRC Chair Christopher T. Hanson in a press release famous joint reviews the NRC and CNSC prior to now have supported “vital licensing actions on a number of superior designs over the previous couple of years. We stay up for ONR’s contributions as all of us think about purposes to construct SMRs and superior reactors,” he stated.
ONR Chief Nuclear Inspector Mark Foy additionally lauded the measure, noting: “The settlement will make sure the environment friendly use of regulators’ time and assets by a willingness to share technical information and judgments, streamlining regulation whereas sustaining security requirements, appearing as an exemplar of how regulators ought to work collectively in at this time’s fashionable world.”
—Sonal Patel is a POWER senior affiliate editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine).
