- Southern’s Bost: Making ATF available in reactors by 2023 “critical” to industry
- Industry, DOE, NRC aligned with “parallel process” approach to ATF licensing
- NEI’s Pitesa: Industry grateful for broad support for ATF in Congress and administration
The nuclear industry has been aggressively developing different types of reactor fuels with improved performance during normal and accident conditions. The industry’s goal is to enable initial deployment of these accident tolerant fuels (ATF) in U.S. commercial reactors in the early to mid-2020s. For this to happen, the U.S. research, development and licensing frameworks need to undergo a paradigm shift to accelerate the way innovative nuclear technologies such as this are brought to market.
Coordination among the various entities involved in the development of ATF has progressed to the point that all stakeholders now agree on the feasibility of a 2023 timeline, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s leadership heard last week.
Accident tolerant fuels have the potential to endure the loss of cooling in a reactor core for longer than current fuel designs and widen the existing safety margin for nuclear plants. They also can improve the performance of existing nuclear plants with longer-lasting fuel, and pave the way for licensing fuels for advanced reactors.
The industry is currently working on different fuel designs from four primary vendors—Framatome, Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF), Westinghouse Electric Co. and Lightbridge. The first lead test assemblies (LTAs) for two different accident tolerant fuel designs from GNF were loaded into Hatch Nuclear Power Plant, Southern Nuclear Co.’s 876-megawatt boiling water reactor in Georgia, in February.
Speaking at the NRC’s April 12 briefing on ATF for the agency’s commissioners, Southern Nuclear’s Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Danny Bost said the industry is excited about the potential benefits of these advanced fuels. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has concluded that these fuels potentially offer benefits both under normal operations and in various accident scenarios. Not only do they promise increased resistance to damage under accident conditions but there also is the potential to allow for more flexibility and efficiency during normal operations, which could bring economic benefits to operators.
Further down the road, properly quantifying the safety benefits could result in simplified regulatory requirements and compliance cost reductions for the industry, Bost noted.
Bost said the industry sees a sense of urgency in bringing these new fuels into wider-scale deployment by 2023-2026. The operating licenses of half or more of the current light water reactor fleet will have expired by the mid-2030s. Operators seeking second license renewals for those reactors should be able to take advantage of the operational economic benefits of accident tolerant fuels if they’re available by the mid-2020s, Bost explained.
“That time frame is critically important to the industry,” he said. Bost said the NRC’s role in helping bring ATF to market in this shorter time frame requires “transformational” changes at the agency in how these innovations are qualified and licensed.
EPRI’s Neil Wilmshurst, vice president of nuclear and chief nuclear officer, added that the “entire community of stakeholders” needs to work together collaboratively to accelerate fuel qualification and licensing and pointed out how some traditional processes used to qualify new technologies can instead proceed in parallel.
Historically, data from experimental testing programs help inform and establish the development of computer-based modeling and simulation codes that then cause additional rounds of experimental testing and confirmation. Now, thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy’s superior predictive modeling and simulation technologies, the data assessment and model development can proceed in parallel along with confirmatory benchmark testing.
NEI suggested this approach in its February comment letter on the NRC’s draft project plan for licensing ATF, saying that “a more transformational shift in the NRC’s fuel licensing approach is needed.” NEI also urged the agency to leverage DOE’s existing advanced modeling and simulation capacity instead of developing its own codes.
NRC staff at the commission briefing appeared to have taken that advice on board, while recognizing that a parallel approach will require more frequent and in-depth interactions with DOE and industry stakeholders.
“There is alignment with the idea to do parallel activities versus activities in series and to have a lot of interaction,” noted Michelle Bales, senior reactor systems engineer in the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research.
The interactions that the NRC and DOE staff have been having at the developer level have been very productive, and there is really great communication and a willingness on both sides to come to a better understanding of what codes are capable of and what the needs of NRC are. A lot … is still ahead of us, but the general demeanor of interactions has been, I think, very productive.
Mirela Gavrilas, director of safety systems in the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, added, “We are confident that the steps we are taking now will appropriately prepare us for effective and efficient licensing of accident tolerant fuels.”
Responding to a question from Commissioner Jeff Baran on the industry’s overall goal to have ATF fuel batches loaded by 2023, she said the staff believes the accelerated schedule to be feasible.
NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki congratulated the staff for its flexible, dynamic stance on the new regulatory approach for ATF and for showing “organizational agility,” which she said is one of the key tenets of the NRC’s Project Aim.
DOE also has been responsive to the industry’s call to accelerate the ATF program. DOE changed its action plan—which originally envisioned the first ATF assemblies being tested in commercial reactors in 2022—to allow the insertion in Hatch of the first two types of ATF test rods this past February, noted Bill McCaughey, acting director of advanced fuel technologies in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
McCaughey said this change is but one reflection of the close collaborative work being conducted among industry fuel vendors, DOE and NRC. Another significant example is the increase in information exchanges between NRC and DOE staff regarding the advanced modeling and simulation work being conducted at DOE’s national labs to support the industry in understanding and characterizing the improvements in plant performance that accident tolerant fuels could bring.
“The $85 million that was recently appropriated by Congress for the ATF program in the fiscal 2018 omnibus budget, and signed into law by the president, reflects a resounding bipartisan show of support for the work being done on the ATF program,” NEI Chief Nuclear Officer Bill Pitesa said.
“We are grateful for the recognition shown by Congress and the administration for this vital program, and hope to see this support continue in fiscal 2019 and beyond.”
The archived webcast, transcript and presentation slides of the April 12 briefing are available on the NRC’s website.