6 Dec 2024
Ivan Selin, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, gave a talk on “Nuclear Regulation Then and Now, with Implications for a World of Novel Nuclear Power Initiatives” with a subsequent discussion, with the event hosted by Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Nuclear power facilities that employ the heat from 1,000 megawatt pressurised water reactors (PWRs) and boiling water reactors (BWRs) to create over 20% of the country's electricity have been subject to regulation by the NRC and its predecessor, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, for the past 60 years.
According to Selin, a promising advanced reactor concept is a smaller high-temperature, low-pressure reactor, like a salt-cooled reactor based on the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) developed and tested at ORNL in the late 1960s. It was noted that smaller salt-cooled reactors could be less costly to build partly because their low pressure would not require the expensive, thick-walled, steel vessels PWRs and BWRs need to ensure their safe operation. Also, building standardized reactor components in factories and assembling the power plants on site might lower costs.
Others in the audience, who had worked on the original MSRE, stated that because of the climate crisis and increasing demands for electricity, the world will need many reactors in the future to produce the needed carbon-free electricity.
“PWRs alone will never get us to the required level of nuclear-generated electricity, so I think that it will be practical for the NRC to develop a revised culture enabling it to regulate low-pressure reactors. These small modular reactors will require the NRC to adopt a radically different, more streamlined and more cut-to-fit approach to regulation. The need for this type of regulatory reform by the NRC is where proponents of safer, more economical and more predictable nuclear power should concentrate the bulk of their efforts” - Ivan Selin