Check of Reactor Design

As the UK government takes forward its plans for a low carbon future, the regulators of the nuclear industry, the Environment Agency, Office for Nuclear Regulation and Natural Resources Wales are currently assessing three new nuclear reactor designs. Teams of nuclear regulators and specialists at the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and the Office for Nuclear Regulation are working together, scrutinising Rolls-Royce’s SMR, Holtec’s SMR 300 and GE-Hitachi’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor designs. Our enabling and innovative Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process also allows anyone to get involved by asking questions about the designs through the GDA comments process. In this blog Mike Webley and Andrew Pynn share insights from a recent ‘joint regulators’ trip to the United States, highlighting that assessment of nuclear reactor designs isn’t just a desk-based exercise. Nuclear power is likely to play a key role in decarbonisation and the Environment Agency is central to this. We want nuclear power to contribute to the government’s strategy in a way that embeds sustainability principles, considers the whole lifecycle of the power station, is designed to be decommissioned and protects people and the environment. The GDA process enables the UK’s nuclear regulators to assess new nuclear power station designs at an early stage of the regulatory process and crucially it provides an opportunity for us to feed back our views to the design companies. It is viewed as a world-leading process to provide reactor designers with early regulatory scrutiny. Our interaction with designers through GDA helps to support growth and fulfils one of our duties; to support sustainable development. GDA can be carried out at a fundamental assessment level or at a detailed assessment level.