Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Oklo and the NRC
     Oklo is a microreactor nuclear startup which “submitted a recharged licensing project plan with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” in September.
     In January of 2022, the NRC denied Oklo’s application to construct and operate a one and a half megawatt fast microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) “based on Oklo’s failure to provide information on several key topics for the Aurora design.”
     Venture-funded Oklo had submitted a combined application to license the design and operation of a “compact fast microreactor.” Oklo had already received a first-of-its-kind site-use permit in 2019 to construct its initial plant on a quarter acre site at the INL.
     The NRC will be receiving an increasing number of new reactor designs and will have to adapt as an institution if it’s to be effective at allowing innovation in the nuclear industry.
NuScale and the NRC
     NuScale Power has led the charge on SMRs for more than a decade but is still struggling with the NRC. It is also facing rising costs on a critical first-of-a-kind four hundred and sixty-two megawatt project in Idaho.
     The proposed project from NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power System, (UAMPS), a group of fifty municipal utilities across seven Western states. It was initially scheduled to begin operation of the first of six SMRs in 2029. However, according to the December edition of the E&E News, “NuScale’s first reactor now faces sharply higher construction cost estimates, due to inflation and higher interest rates. If projected costs rise above $58 per megawatt-hour, it will trigger an up-or-down vote as early as next month from the project’s anchor customers.” E&E also reported that the costs of construction materials such as steel plate and carbon steel piping have risen sharply since the project was approved in 2020.
     In addition to cost issues, NuScale has run into regulatory problems. The company replaced its NRC-approved fifty-megawatt design. Now it needs to gain regulatory approval for the seventy-seven-megawatt module that it plans to use for the UAMPS project. It was reported in November that the NRC has concerns about the new design. In a letter to NuScale, the NRC said that the companies proposed module raised “several challenging and/or significant issues” with its draft application.
     SMRs architecture is an unproven solution to the nuclear industry’s cost and schedule overruns. Scaling down new reactors in power output and size theoretically enables SMR and microreactor solutions that can be constructed at less cost off-site using fewer custom components with total lower total project costs.
     However, even NuScale’s design, a SMR that bears some resemblance to existing light-water reactors, poses a challenge to the testing and approval processes of the NRC. NuScale says it has spent over five hundred million dollars and expended more than two million labor hours to compile the information required for its design-certification application.
     It’s not just the nuclear regulators, engineers and politicians who need to be heard from on this project. These days, it’s the nuclear accountants who have the final say. So far, SMRs and microreactors have not proven to be a financial or regulator slam dunk.
Ending the Nuclear Malaise
     The U.S. public remains evenly divided over nuclear power and the regulatory process sometimes seems to be intended to discourage the construction of new nuclear power plants. This is now a real window of opportunity to construct new U.S. nuclear power reactors after several lost decades.
     The U.S. nuclear industry finally has some political, financial and engineering momentum behind it after decades of stagnation. However, it needs to prove its viability by putting some megawatts into service in the 2020s.