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Welcome to Fusion City, USA

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10 pointsmfiguiere4 comments

Anyone who's holding their breath for fusion needs a cold shower.

Fusion is a nuclear technology. And so it falls under the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). NRC is extraordinarily conservative. Well, all government commissions are conservative, and NRC is no exception.

NuScale got an approval for their SMR about one year ago. Their SMR is a new techonogy (there are no other SMR around, not in the US at least), but it's based on the most widespread nuclear reactor type in the world, the pressurized water reactor (PWR). PWRs are somewhat of a boring technology, but they are well known, they work, and they are safe. So safe that if a terrorist group takes control of one, there's no way for them to trigger a nuclear explosion or a Chernobyl event. Despite that, the NRC took 6 years to issue their approval. That's for the most widepsread design for an existing nuclear technology, fission. There are 100 fission reactors in the US, somewhat down from the peak. The NRC, being their regulator, has extensive experience with them. They have seen lots of failure modes. They obviously exchange notes with all other nuclear regulators in the world. Still, 6 years.

How long will they take to review and approve a design for a fusion reactor. Technology that does not exist in any form now. Not even in research form. There is no working commercial fusion reactor, no regulatory body that has ever regulated one, nobody has ever seen one working. Will they give an approval in 6 years? It might take them 6 years to only articulate what points a submissions needs to address.

There is no way a commercial fusion reactor is hooked to the grid in the US in the next 3 decades. Except if a certain preacher from the Middle East comes from the heavens and makes it happen.

The NRC does not plan to regulate fusion power the same way it does fission power [1]. Rather, it’s handled under the same framework as particle accelerators, which in many cases, falls under the jurisdiction of state health and environmental regulations. My partner was a state regulator involved in the rule making process for this, and the rules are intended to be far less restrictive than what fission requires.

Regulatory requirements are the least of fusion’s problems, compared to the technological challenges of actually working reliably in the first place, let alone with the high uptime that fission power enjoys.

1. https://www.nrc.gov/cdn/doc-collection-news/2023/23-029.pdf

Second to last paragraph:

> That matters because fusion research, with no risk of runway chain reactions and producing vastly less radioactive waste, is being conducted under existing regulations by individual states, rather than the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Excited to see test results over the next few years from these fusion approaches.

Alternative energy opens possibilities to bring up other countries' tech competency without the typical pollution.

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