Part 2 of 2 Parts
Rumina Velshi is the Former President and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). During a separate session, she said the organization “had read the headwinds, knew we needed to be in a state of readiness to license and regulate SMRs, advanced technologies”. However, she said that one of the biggest challenges that regulators face is having enough money to be anticipatory and build up capacity.
Velshi added, “Regulators only start getting funding from their licensees once there’s an application in front of them, which is a bit too late then to start saying, oh, I need to hire more people. And so if you don’t go down that route, then you have to go to government and ask for a budget. And governments tend to be in a perpetual state of fiscal constraint.”
Velshi said that the CNSC took the option of asking Ontario Power Generation, the licensee for the Darlington SMR project, to license its application.
Velshi added, “Knowing that funding was available made all the difference for us to build that capacity. Regulators find it very difficult because they somehow feel this undermines their independence by asking for that funding up front. It actually doesn’t. It just enables you to make things happen … Now, we did get the government funding down the road, but it was just the need to be creative.”
Mark Foy is the Chief Executive and Chief Nuclear Inspector of the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation. He said, “today’s environment is something that is completely different to that which has existed previously. The first nuclear programs were very much national nuclear programs with nations looking to deploy their own technology, unregulated within their own domestic frameworks.” He said regulators are now looking for a collaborative approach.
The CNSC and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been collaborating with each other for several years. In 2019 they signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) covering technical reviews of advanced reactors and SMR technologies. In January 2023, a Terms of Reference document was signed and published between the CNSC and the ONR for an MoC between the two organizations on sharing best practice and experience reviewing AMR and SMR technologies. The agreement also included future work to facilitate a joint technical review of AMR and SMR technologies and to cover pre-application activities to ensure mutual preparedness to review them effectively and efficiently.
Velshi said that this collaboration was “really a shift in paradigm” for regulators “because most regulators feel this is challenging their sovereignty if you’re now depending on another regulator to do what seemed to be part of your core work. But that was a very bold step that we took … I think that has set the stage for greater collaboration for regulators”.
She said that the biggest challenge for regulators was the need for “the cultural shift, the mindset shift that is required. It’s not around technology. It’s not about regulatory frameworks. It really is how do we change the way we see things. And because we have such, frankly, an impeccable safety and track record, it is why upset the cart that’s really working … There is a lot of inertia to overcome”.