TRANSPORTATION | SMRs
Right: Different rules apply depending on whether nuclear materials or a reactor is considered to be a part of the vessel or is treated as cargo Source: NTS
and some way to intervene if necessary but if they
haven’t got a developed nuclear regulator, they won’t have the skills to do that. That is a lot to do.” In that situation, the host nation are perhaps not going
to want to have to develop the necessary regulatory bodies or take too much responsibility for oversight of a plant. In which case it’s more likely that the regulatory side will just focus on making sure that operations are being conducted safely while the operator will be responsible for all of the running, maintenance, staffing and also taking the reactors away at the end of the project. However, where those responsibilities lie will need to established in advance, as Chaplin says: “I think another thing which really needs to be considered by the designers and operators long before deployment is to actually work out who will be responsible for what. That is not so difficult with, say, a land-based SMR but for a floating one that could be more challenging. It will need to determined whether responsibility rests with the country that supplied it and is operating it, if they’re going to be responsible for things like safety, security and
safeguards, for example, or whether it would be the host state that would be responsible for those. We don’t really know the answer as to how that will work yet.” These regulatory issues may also have far-reaching
implications for market development too. For some SMR designs, from a regulatory stance and an operations perspective, they are not really any different to the large-scale plants that are already in operation or being developed. “For these kinds of designs the actual modules will be transported without any fuel involved so they are just pieces of equipment that will be constructed and operated in the same way as a large-scale PWR. Designs from Westinghouse, Rolls-Royce, and GE Hitachi are essentially smaller versions of conventional designs and so are potentially going to avoid a lot of these transport and regulatory issues because it’s already been done for their bigger cousins. They might actually get ahead of advanced designs just because they already have, for example, transport package approval and all the associated validation and testing,” notes Chaplin.
Above: Some SMR designs, like this one from Rolls Royce, are closely related to larger conventional reactors and therefore do not face the same regulatory challenges as novel designs such as molten salt reactors Source: Rolls Royce SMR
30 | November 2023 |
www.neimagazine.com
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