Matthew Bandyk reports that as NuScale Power LLC tries to navigate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission review process to become the first developer of the small modular reactor design in the U.S., the developer of the portable reactors has to confront some big numbers. The Oregon-based developer has more than 500 personnel working on the regulatory approval of the small modular reactor, or SMR, design, dealing with over 210,000 NRC safety and other requirements and keeping track of 1,360 relevant documents, NuScale representatives said at an April 21 public meeting at NRC's headquarters in Rockville, Md.
Despite the daunting task of getting its design certified by the NRC  estimated by the company to cost about $1 billion total and take 40 months, not including all the pre-application work that has been going on since 2008  NuScale got some good news at the meeting when NRC staffers said they expect to hit an important milestone for the review process in July.
The developer, originally founded based on a scientific approach developed at Oregon State University and since bought by Fluor Corp., had expressed concern that the NRC was not giving NuScale enough guidance on how to prepare the application. The design-specific review standard is a document that lays out what the NRC expects for the design certification application, and without this document NuScale is essentially blindfolded, NuScale Chief Commercial Officer Michael McGough has said.
The NRC recently indicated that it would give NuScale the design-specific review standard six months before the application was submitted, a timeline that NuScale responded was not long enough. But the NRC staff said at the April 21 meeting that it expects to publicly release the document in July, a year and a half before NuScale expects to file the application at the end of 2016. McGough said this date for the design-specific review standard addresses the company concern.
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