By RAY HENRY
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA – Utility companies and federal regulators will have to be disciplined in order to successfully use a new, streamlined process of reviewing a wave of proposed nuclear power plants, the nation’s top nuclear regulator said Tuesday.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko told The Associated Press in an interview that the companies and the regulators are learning to respond to one another more rapidly as federal officials use a new process that strongly encourages power companies to build nuclear power plants based on standard designs.
The last wave of nuclear building produced a fleet of 104 reactors, none of which are identical. The new process is getting one of its first big tests as the Atlanta-based Southern Co. seeks to build two more nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia.
“We’ve seen with a variety of different applicants a learning process as we’ve gone along,” Jaczko said, speaking at the NRC’s regional headquarters in Atlanta. “Everyone, I think, has gotten better at that, including the NRC.”
The new review scheme was born in the 1980s when power plant owners lobbied the government to streamline the regulatory process and told its suppliers to design reactors that were more reliable, cheaper and based on standard designs that could be replicated.
During the last wave of building, utility companies had more freedom to order a custom nuclear reactor – which bogged down the review – and they could make significant changes while building.
The new system strongly encourages power plant developers to pick from one of several designs that could ultimately be approved by Jaczko’s commission. In return for not making customized changes to a design, utility companies would need just one license to build and operate instead of two licenses. They would also gain the ability to more easily replicate approved designs, cutting down on engineering costs and review time.
Jaczko said utility companies have learned that during the review process they must answer questions from NRC regulators earlier than was customary in decades past. NRC regulators are under more pressure to resolve problems early in the process because a license represents a final decision.
“The number one thing, I think, it requires is a strong degree of discipline,” Jaczko said. “It’s discipline on the part of the reviews because once we issue that license, the decisions are done and construction would commence.”
He said striving for standardized designs of nuclear reactors should pay dividends in the future, both in making reviews of new designs more efficient and in monitoring nuclear plants once they are built.
“If you have a problem occur within one plant within a fleet and you fix that one problem, you know how to apply that solution to every plant within that fleet,” Jaczko said. “So there are some safety benefits that can come out of it.”
Assuming power companies can prove their proposed plants are safe, Jaczko said he believed financing would the largest hurdle to building – although it’s outside the control of the NRC.
“If you look at the cost of building a plant, it’s billions of dollars. Licensing a plant is in the hundred million dollar range,” he said. “So it’s a much easier financial investment to go through the licensing process than to go through the licensing process and actually begin construction.”