An important obstacle to timely licensing is that the harmonisation developed by national nuclear safety authorities mainly concerns high-level safety standards. Whilst this is certainly useful to attain a similar level of safety at EU level, it does not contribute significantly to more rapid or generic licensing of new construction projects or to extend the operational life of existing reactors.
Hence, additional work is necessary to detail the harmonisation of safety standards or to further investigate hypothesis and feasibility analysis that underpin possible further action as described below. The Commission wishes to achieve this by building on existing credible initiatives that have already shown added value.
The current ongoing initiatives are listed below together with the respective deliverables expected from the contractor.
1. Deliverable: a benchmarking of the EUR documents against a) all applicable WENRA reference levels, b) IAEA standards and c) requirements of the amended directive on nuclear safety as detailed by ENER/JRC (in development). It will be submitted to both NPPs vendors and nuclear safety authorities for comments/endorsement.
2. Deliverable: a feasibility study on the possibility to extend the existing work performed under the Franco-German ETC initiative to other national legal frameworks and other type of reactors. If the study is positive, it should indicate in detail the steps to be taken to realise the full study, should it be decided by the Commission.
3. The ERDA (European reactor design acceptance) proposal aims at a common design review and acceptance, the results of which would be shared among several EU Member States allowing the reactor design to be acceptable to all participating countries, except for necessary adaptation to specific local conditions, leading to effective European standardisation of reactor designs. The suggested approach is essentially based on voluntary actions by regulators and TSOs with support of the Commission.
Deliverable: a detailed description of the technical content that a EU common pre-licensing process should include, taking into account the different types of reactors, the applicable safety standards and (as far as possible) the diversity of Member States national framework.
4. Benchmarking and peer reviews performed by national safety authorities or IAEA expert missions are essential tools to achieve a harmonised level of safety in the EU and worldwide. Those tools are of particular interest for the numerous expected LTO in the EU. At the time being related efforts developed by regulators or the IAEA missions (e.g. SALTO) focus in priority on ageing effects, less on ‘reasonably practicable’ safety upgrades that accompany the LTO programmes. Hence, common sets of technical references integrating both ageing and safety upgrades would help all involved actors to deliver programmes across the different Member States with equivalent safety levels.
Deliverable: in close cooperation with nuclear safety authorities, a set of technical reference guide(s) for LTO will be prepared, covering in particular aspects related to the safety upgrades. In addition, a benchmarking of national LTO programmes against the amended directives will be defined and described (technical content of their terms of reference), particularly regarding Articles 8a and 8b of amended nuclear safety Directive, for future use by regulators.
