| REGULATION
significant effort from the reactor vendor to produce new documentation that was not required in other countries. It might be expected that more prescriptive regulatory
frameworks are less flexible and would result in many potential design changes through the licensing process; however this is not necessarily the case. Just because a regulatory regime is less prescriptive in nature, it does not mean that significant design changes will not be required to fulfil national regulatory requirements.
Implications for new reactor designs What does this mean for new reactors designs proposed to come to market in the next decade? If we do nothing and national regulatory approaches continue to drive significant design changes — resetting developers to FOAK projects in each new country — many designs will never reach the market or will struggle to expand beyond their country-of- origin regulatory framework and supply chain. It is vital that national regulators and reactor vendors
learn the lessons of the national approach to regulation of Gen III reactor designs and apply them to the review of emerging technologies, such as SMRs, to facilitate a wider deployment of standard designs, and support deeper decarbonisation of our energy systems. The CORDEL report makes several recommendations
for reactor vendors, licensees, and national regulators to be more cooperative and expand upon both the specific
safety requirements identified within the report and the key lessons to develop a streamlined approach to regulation, utilising risk informed decision making where possible. This would require extensive collaboration between
governments, national regulators and industry. To facilitate this collaboration, the report points
to another CORDEL report, ‘Harmonization of reactor design and licensing: lesson learned from transport’ which recommends the formation of a multi-national advisory panel, whose aim would be to facilitate just such collaboration among national regulators. However, this cannot be done by national regulators
alone. Governments must provide the policy and financial support to allow regulators to undertake this collaboration, and industry must collectively support regulators’ efforts to harmonise industrial codes and standards and to develop industry positions on key safety requirements. Note that this is not a proposal to challenge national
regulatory sovereignty or reduce the required level of safety standards. In fact, through appropriate collaboration, both of these can be maintained and even enhanced. There is a lot of work to be done if this is to become
a reality and it will not be easy, but without streamlining approaches to regulation, the ability of emerging designs to achieve NOAK costs would be limited, and there may only be a small number of countries with sufficient capacity to build the requisite number of plants. ■
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