America's Nuclear Reluctance
Reason magazine|June 2022
ON FEBRUARY 14, 2022, Oregon’s NuScale Power signed an agreement with the Polish mining and processing firm KGHM to deploy NuScale’s innovative small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Poland by 2029.
By Ronald Bailey
America's Nuclear Reluctance

At the U.N.’s Glasgow Climate Change Conference in November, NuScale contracted with a Romanian energy company to deploy its SMR technology in that country by 2028. NuScale has signed similar memoranda of understanding with electric power companies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

This kind of advanced energy technology will likely be powering homes and businesses in Europe before the first reactor is completed in the United States. That’s because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is in no hurry to help.

NuScale’s SMR technology did receive an NRC staff “standard design approval” in September 2020. But that happened largely because NuScale’s technology employs a smaller-scale version of the light-water reactors that the NRC bureaucracy has been (over-) regulating for decades.

This story is from the June 2022 edition of Reason magazine.

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