Advanced Reactor Developers’ Focus Shifts to Deployment: US NIC

The 2020 survey results show that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has made “very good progress” on the development of a licensing framework for advanced designs, said former NRC commissioner, Jeff Merrifield, Energy practice partner at Pillsbury and chairman of U.S. NIC’s advanced reactor task force, in a presentation of the survey results. 

Merrifield added that the non-policy issue that worried the U.S. NIC advanced reactor members most was the availability of high assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.

Survey responders were allowed to select more than one issue. The question was not asked in the 2018 survey.

“According to the 2018 survey results, the most important policy issue for advanced reactor developers was NRC’s licensing framework,” said Merrifield. “While still important to U.S. NIC members, the licensing framework issue in the 2020 survey ranked below four other policy issues.”

The 2020 survey found that all 16 of the advanced reactor developers that responded plan to use the site boundary as the emergency planning zone, rather than a much larger planning zone for traditional large reactors, and say a generic environmental impact statement, or GEIS, for licensing such designs is needed, according to Merrifield. 

The 2018 survey did not ask about those topics. More than half of the designs envision the use of a lifetime core or cores replaced every five years or more, according to Merrifield’s presentation.