Challenges of SMR Licensing Practices

Abstract

The trend of nuclear industry has been moving towards more simple designs and natural circulation based solutions. Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are designed to benefit simplicity and passivity in such high level that is not possible in large NPPs. Modularity, being one of the SMR design basis, can be defined as several reactors on same site with shared systems. In addition modularity can be seen as a construction method to decrease the actions on site, as it is already used in some large reactors. Modularity is one of the features providing the need of licensing process modification.Nuclear industry is quite specific industry field in terms of licensing. This being said, there are also other industries, such as aviation industry, that have similar or comparable safety features to deal with. This study investigates features of different countries nuclear licensing processes and also it introduces certain factors of aviation industry licensing that could be applied also for nuclear field. The focus of the study is in suitable licensing process development for light water SMRs in a country like Finland.