Approval of Construction of Four Containment-Free Reactors is Another Clear Sign of a Broken Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a permit to Long Mott Energy to construct four small modular reactors (SMRs) adjacent to a Dow chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas. The planned 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled "pebble-bed" reactors being developed by the company X-Energy are of a design never before built in the United States.

Below is a statement from Dr. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"This reckless approval represents a failure to protect public health and safety of the highest order.

"The NRC boasts that it issued the construction permit ahead of schedule, following its marching orders from the Trump administration to complete all licensing reviews within 18 months regardless of application complexity. However, the NRC only accomplished this feat by pushing consideration of critical safety questions to a later date-issues the NRC should've fully resolved before green lighting construction.

"Chief among these issues is whether the reactor needs a physical containment structure to protect the public from radioactive releases should the highly radioactive reactor fuel overheat and become damaged. The reactor design the NRC approved doesn't have such a containment. Instead, the safety of the design relies almost entirely on the ability of the reactor fuel to contain radioactive materials even in severe accident scenarios-which has never been demonstrated.

"X-Energy is conducting a test campaign at the Idaho National Laboratory to study whether the fuel it plans to use, called 'TRISO,' will actually perform as well as was assumed in the license application, but the data won't be available for years. Moreover, a fuel's safety strongly depends on the ability to manufacture a large quantity of fuel of extremely high quality. Yet X-Energy has been having quality problems during construction of its Tennessee factory, where it plans to manufacture the fuel-which doesn't instill confidence in its ability to make high-quality fuel should the factory ever be completed.

"The NRC made the highly consequential decision to allow construction of the reactors to proceed before having all the information it needed to ensure their safety. The NRC maintains that issuance of the construction permit does not constitute final approval of the containment-free design. However, even if the fuel eventually turns out not to be up to par, it is highly doubtful that the NRC would require Long Mott to retrofit the reactors with physical containments-an expensive and burdensome endeavor. President Trump's Executive Order 14300 requires the NRC to 'establish stringent thresholds for circumstances in which the NRC may demand changes to reactor design once construction is underway'-putting significant political pressure on the NRC not to require retrofits, even if public safety demands it."