Nuclear services company NuScale’s advanced reactor design should soon be certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to be built in the United States, the agency said in a press release last week.
The commission directed its staff to draw up a final rule approving NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) design, first proposed in 2016, according to the release. The certification, which signals that the design meets the agency’s “applicable safety requirements,” will go into effect 30 days after NRC staff publish their final rule in the Federal Register, the press release said.
As of Tuesday, agency staff had yet to publish the final rule. A spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via email Monday that it should go live “in the near future.”
NRC’s certification is aimed at streamlining the licensing process for future nuclear facilities that plan to use NuScale’s SMR design. Applicants will not have to address safety issues already covered in the commission’s design approval, the press release said. Instead, NRC’s licensing review “would address any remaining safety and environmental issues for the proposed nuclear power plant.”
The announcement follows a June report from a Stanford University-led research team that raised concerns about waste streams from advanced reactor designs such as NuScale’s SMR. The report concluded that, among other things, SMRs would produce a greater waste volume than conventional nuclear reactors, and that the spent fuel from such reactors would be around 50% more radioactive.
NuScale pushed back on the report, telling RadWaste Monitor at the time that the company’s SMR design “does not create waste and material streams that are novel to the nuclear power industry.” Waste management practices for NuScale’s advanced nuclear fuel are also “very well-established,” the company argued.
Oregon-based NuScale, in which Fluor is a leading investor, is working with a number of partners to deploy its proposed SMR technology. The company in 2021 signed an agreement with Grant County, Wash., to explore advanced reactors. NuScale is also working with a public utility commission in Utah to develop an SMR facility by 2029.
