The company behind an advanced reactor design insisted Wednesday that its technology was misrepresented by a scathing university report published earlier this week.
NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) design “does not create waste and material streams that are novel to the nuclear power industry,” a spokesperson for the company told Exchange Monitor in a statement Wednesday. The chemical and physical characteristics of spent fuel from NuScale’s SMR are similar to those of waste from conventional nuclear reactors, the spokesperson said.
The company’s statement came in response to a study published Monday by a Stanford University-led research team that concluded, among other things, that SMRs would produce a greater waste volume than conventional nuclear reactors, and that the spent fuel from advanced reactors would be around 50% more radioactive. NuScale’s SMR design was among those the Stanford team reviewed.
NuScale also pushed back Wednesday on the report’s claim that its SMR’s spent fuel could not be safely stored in a repository alongside conventional waste. “[T]he waste management practices of this type of fuel are very well-established, unlike the radioactive waste that would result from non-light water advanced reactors with novel fuel designs,” the company said.
The Stanford report’s conclusions “do not apply to NuScale’s technology,” the spokesperson told Exchange Monitor.
Meanwhile, NuScale is waiting on final approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start building its SMR. The company in 2021 signed an agreement with Grant County, Wash., to work on advanced nuclear power and NuScale is also cooperating with a public utility commission in Utah to develop a similar facility by 2029.
