Legal and Policy Advancements for Advanced Reactors
The reintroduction of Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (NELA) caps off a week of activities focused on innovation, and follows on advancement of key U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) guidance on advanced reactor licensing.
We covered NELA when it was first introduced in 2018, focusing on its important bipartisan contributions to reestablishing global leadership in nuclear…
Activity across the government has put advanced nuclear reactors center stage early this year. With the signing of the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, hearings on Capitol Hill, and the release of a Department of Defense (DOD) Request for Information (RFI) for small mobile reactors, it is clear the federal government sees advanced reactors…
Happy New Year! As we start off 2019, we want to motive the nuclear community by sharing a few legal updates and popular reports that have come out around the end of the last year.
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Blog author Sachin Desai, along with a member of the NRC staff, both acting in their individual capacity, recently published an article in the American Bar Association’s nuclear law publication entitled “Preparing for Advanced Reactors: Exploring Regulatory and Licensing Reform.” The article reviews advanced reactor licensing reform efforts, discusses an NRC staff recommendation…
Earlier this month, a leading group of Canadian power companies and government entities (although not the nuclear regulator) issued a “Canadian SMR Roadmap,” an 89 page plan for Canada to become a leader in small modular and advanced reactor development (there is also a smaller executive summary). Although the roadmap takes a…
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently released a staff paper-SECY-18-0096-seeking Commission approval of a new proposed methodology for establishing “functional containment” performance criteria for non-light water reactors (non-LWRs). This methodology would step away from deterministic containment design parameters and embrace a concept of “‘functional containment’ as a barrier, or a set of…
Recently, the Hill has been taking a flurry of legislative actions that impact the advanced reactor community across all spectra. We provide a summary of some of the major bills going through Congress below, including a couple which have recently become law or may become so soon.
Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (NEICA) (S. 97).…
A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators has introduced the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act (NELA) (S 3422), a bill designed to help the United States return to its lead in nuclear energy technology. The bill sponsors explain that the U.S. has yielded this position to Russia and China–weakening our energy security, economic competitiveness, and national…
This month, the NRC published an early draft regulatory guide on the content of license applications for non-LWRs. The document is designed to help license applicants apply the NRC’s movement towards a risk-informed/performance-based regulatory approach towards the drafting of an actual license application.
The document is in part the result of the Southern Company-led Licensing…
The NRC staff recently publicly released a major new paper embracing regulatory reform to advance risk-informed regulation for advanced reactors. Included in this paper is a concept of a “10 CFR Part 53”—a potentially entirely new process for licensing advanced reactors.
SECY-18-0060, “Achieving Modern Risk-Informed Regulation,” proposes “several significant and specific revisions” to the…
