IAEA advocates harmonisation of SMR technologies and regulatory frameworks

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says efforts to align different types of small modular reactor (SMR) technologies and their regulatory approaches continue to make strong progress.

Speaking at the Nuclear Harmonisation and Standardisation Initiative (NHSI), IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said the NHSI was set up because advanced reactors – particularly SMRs, a major topic of discussion in the debate on Australia’s nuclear future – need a standardised design.

Mr Mariano said that this would not only enable the rapid and efficient global deployment of SMRs but also help developers achieve economies of scale.

Harmonised approaches

“Harmonised regulatory approaches are also vital to enable fast and safe deployment of SMRs,” Mr Grossi said.

“Hardly a day passes without very exciting news of some company striking a deal or somebody saying that it’s going to be doing something important and exciting in SMRs.”

“NHSI is about what goes behind the headlines, what goes behind the expectations.”

‘Regulatory convergence’

Mr Grossi told the gathering that SMRs are both “what the market needs and what the planet needs.”

“The global deployment of SMRs will need a degree of regulatory convergence.”

“We’re not aiming at unison, as it’s impossible, but without some degree of concrete collaboration where we can leverage what others are doing, the business model of modularity and flexibility is simply not going to work.”

Industry tracking

Aline des Cloizeaux, director of the IAEA’s Division of Nuclear Power, said the aim is to make nuclear energy simpler while keeping it safe and secure.

She noted that the industry track of NHSI has had more than 200 contributors from over 30 countries and has worked in four main areas of harmonisation including end-user requirements and collaboration on computer codes for monitoring the safety and performance of advanced nuclear reactors.

The short-term goals are to map pathways and reduce timelines and costs for both vendors and customers, to facilitate common approaches for regulatory approvals and to gather lessons learned from SMR deployment models.

The long-term goal is to preparing industry, end users and countries for large-scale SMR deployment.

Close co-operation

NHSI has been working closely with national regulators while always ensuring member states maintain their sovereignty and decision-making.

NHSI is now moving to the next phase, which will be to implement many of the recommendations developed by the working groups.

Phase II will also focus on providing tools to better understand regulatory commonalities and differences, examine technology-specific user requirements and explore what is needed to facilitate the approval of what is known as long-lead items.

Nuclear power – currently the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity behind hydropower – accounts for about 25% of the world’s clean electricity.