Safety Evaluation Related to the U.S. SFR Owner, LLC Construction Permit Application for the Kemmerer Power Station, Unit 1, (EPID L-2024-CPS-0000) - ML25329A252.pdf

Safety Evaluation Related to the U.S. SFR Owner, LLC Construction Permit Application for the Kemmerer Power Station, Unit 1, (EPID L-2024-CPS-0000) - ML25329A252.pdf Natrium Closes in on a Construction Permit The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that there are no safety issues in the way of giving a construction permit to TerraPower to build its Natrium plant, a sodium-cooled low-pressure, high-temperature fast reactor. The staff asserted that its finding was “the first use of a fully risk-informed, performance-based approach to establish the licensing basis for a commercial power reactor.” Although a performance-based rule, like Part 53, would be needed to achieve that milestone. The term “performance-based” means that the requirements were stated in terms of objectives to be met, but that the NRC did not prescribe precisely how the applicant was supposed to meet them. “Risk-informed” has been a goal of the commission for about 30 years, and means that the attention of regulators, plant designers, and managers is focused on requirements that are significant to safety. The company has already begun building an accompanying molten salt system that will store energy from the reactor in the form of heat, to produce electricity in varying amounts, depending on grid demand. In current-generation nuclear plants, the electricity-generating system is integral to plant design, and its construction must also wait for issuance of a construction permit. But in the Natrium design, the reactor is de-coupled from electricity generation. The reactor will run at a steady heat output, but electricity production can be higher or lower, allowing the owner to sell into the market when wholesale prices are higher, and withhold production when the grid is flooded with cheap surges of renewable energy. TerraPower still needs a hearing and a vote by the Commission before it gets a construction permit, and after that, it has to build the plant in adherence with the design and with various quality control requirements. But the finding from the staff, a major milestone, came a month earlier than scheduled, and despite accelerating the schedule it was also under budget. It follows a finding by the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an independent oversight group, approving the design. The NRC’s approval is contained in a report of more than 750 pages, of which 13 are a reference list of acronyms and abbreviations. The project is in Kemmerer, Wyoming, near a decommissioning coal plant. It is one of two flagship projects under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, launched in May 2020 with a goal of building two reactors by 2027. Natrium now plans to load fuel in 2030 and begin running the following year. One complication is that it needs uranium fuel enriched to nearly 20 percent. The initial plan was to buy that from the Russian state nuclear monopoly, but that idea was dropped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Western companies, and one in South Africa, are now gearing up to make that fuel. The Energy Department’s other flagship advanced reactor project, a gas-graphite pebble bed model, is a step behind; that company applied for a construction permit in March.