America’s Nuclear Reluctance

On February 14, 2022, Oregon’s NuScale Power signed an agreement with the Polish mining and processing firm KGHM to deploy NuScale’s innovative small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Poland by 2029. At the U.N.’s Glasgow Climate Change Conference in November, NuScale contracted with a Romanian energy company to deploy its SMR technology in that country by 2028. NuScale has signed similar memoranda of understanding with electric power companies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

This kind of advanced energy technology will likely be powering homes and businesses in Europe before the first reactor is completed in the United States. That’s because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is in no hurry to help.

NuScale’s SMR technology did receive an NRC staff “standard design approval” in September 2020. But that happened largely because NuScale’s -technology employs a smaller-scale version of the light-water reactors that the NRC -bureaucracy has been (over-)regulating for decades.

Even with that step out of the way, NuScale has been working with the NRC for years and remains stymied by bureaucratic obstacles. The company began its pre-application meetings with the NRC in 2008 and formally submitted its design certification application in 2016. NuScale is now waiting for the NRC commissioners to issue a “standard design certification,” which the company hopes to receive later this year.

There are more steps after that. Nu‑ Scale has contracted with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) to build a six-module SMR project generating 462 megawatts at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls. UAMPS must also receive NRC approval. It plans to submit, by 2024, its combined license application seeking authorization to construct and operate a nuclear power plant at the Idaho site. If approved, the plant could be completed by 2030, having survived 22 years of regulatory inertia before the first electron reaches the first customer.

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