Authorities have not yet made a decision on how to manage the waste from the nuclear power plant with small modular reactors that will be developed in Romania, said on Friday, the general manager of Nuclearelectrica, Cosmin Ghiţă.
“Nuclear fuel management is indeed a matter of many aspects, engineering, capabilities and safety, security, environment. We currently have nuclear waste management plans, which we coordinate with National Agency for Radioactive Waste for existing technology. For small modular reactors, the footprint of waste development is much smaller than that of existing reactors and we are looking at several solutions to lead to their efficient management. There are several scenarios – one for storage and another for reprocessing.
”Romania does not have reprocessing capabilities, the only country in Europe that has such a capacity is France, and there are other countries designated as nuclear powers that have such capabilities. But for now we don’t have a concrete decision taken on how to manage the resulting waste, but this will be part of projecting of the plant we have discussed and will clearly be addressed in the environmental permit applications in accordance with the environmental permits we have in use for existing plants. But we want to determine this on the basis of technical, economic, environmental impact and security analyzes. And these analyzes being complex, the solution will be given when we have all the necessary data and we have the analysis completed,” said Cosmin Ghiţă, according to Agerpres.
The General Manager of Nuclearelectrica stressed that the technology of the plant with small modular reactors that will be implemented in Romania has been authorized by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“We have studied several types of modular reactor technology, just like other members of the industry – Canada, USA, UK, France, Poland. Most are looking at the implementation of these types of technology. We will have to phase out by 2032 about 4.6Gwe, so we have a time pressure.
”The NuScale technology, which we have selected to implement such a power plant in partnership, with a possible delivery of a first module in this decade, is the only technology which was authorized by an international regulator, by the US regulator, USNRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission). In the US, several types of technologies are being developed, I think they have 20 or 30 vendors at the moment that are developing different types of modular reactors. Not all of these technologies have passed USNRC approval. The technology and operating principle of these small modular plants are not new. It is a technology that we, the industry, know for over 50 years. The first reactors to be implemented were on a smaller scale, for experimental purposes. We have small reactors in various non-civil applications, and at the moment the principle of using light water reactors is applied in 330 power plants worldwide,” stated Cosmin Ghita.
The General Manager of Nuclearelectrica mentioned that the technology of the plant with small modular reactors will be evaluated and authorized according to the national and international legislation.