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

The following is an excerpt from an article published recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists and written by Edwyn Lyman, Director, Nuclear Power Safety.

Statement by Dr. Edwin S. Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists

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.

Read the full article here.