Pfluger Spotlights NRC Approval of West Texas Molten Salt Reactor

WASHINGTON, DC — Congressman August Pfluger (TX-11), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, participated in an Energy Subcommittee hearing, where he questioned leaders from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on advancing America's nuclear energy future.

During the hearing, Rep. Pfluger highlighted a major milestone for West Texas and the future of nuclear energy: the NRC's approval of a small molten salt reactor at Abilene Christian University. He emphasized the important role West Texas plays in maintaining this momentum as the U.S. works to lead in advanced nuclear technology.

Rep. Pfluger also urged Chairman Nieh to ensure that licensing work completed under the Department of Energy's pilot program is carried over efficiently as Natura Resources and other companies look to scale from demonstration reactors to full commercial deployment.

Witnesses from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission included The Honorable Ho K. Nieh, Chairman, The Honorable David A. Wright, Commissioner, The Honorable Bradley R. Crowell, Commissioner, The Honorable Matthew J. Marzano, Commissioner, and The Honorable Douglas W. Weaver, Commissioner.

Read Rep. Pfluger's exchange with witnesses below:

Rep. Pfluger: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the commissioners for the work you do and get a lot of compliments from a lot of people on now moving a little bit more at the speed of need and getting things processed. We have an important project that y'all have approved and issued a license to at Abilene Christian University (ACU) for the construction of a small molten salt reactor. And very proud of what Abilene Christian and the Nature public-private partnership have done on that. It really marks the first permit for a liquid-fueled advanced reactor, and only the second for any advanced reactor issued by you, by the NRC. So, Chairman Nieh, now that ACU's partner Natura has demonstrated this and is part of the DOE Pilot Program, can you provide a little bit of clarification and remarks as to how licensing under that pilot program for the demonstration reactor will translate or carry over into NRC licensing for the build-out of a commercial reactor?

Chairman Nieh: Thank you, Congressman. As I mentioned in the earlier session, we, the NRC, will use information from the DOE pilot projects to support NRC review for commercial deployment, and what we will do is use that information efficiently. We won't redo the work, but we will validate that it meets NRC requirements.

Rep. Pfluger: I think that's been the frustration of any government bureaucracy. Is the relitigating of things that have already been discussed, and going from one agency to another. So, that's very much appreciated. And there are industries beyond nuclear energy where high consequence activities are undertaken every day, oil and gas, just to name a few, aerospace defense, and the equipment and the components used in these industries are manufactured with safety and with quality at the forefront. And the nuclear industry supply chain is unique in that the safety-related structures and systems and components can generally only be provided by a very small pool of suppliers, but they've adopted the NQA-1 quality management standard, and this has the effect of constraining the industry on its supply chain. Can you maybe address some of the actions that have been taken to the potential use of alternative quality management systems, such as those used in other critical industries, for supplying safety-related or structural systems and other components to the nuclear industry specifically?

Chairman Neih: Yes, sir, there are already existing provisions in NRC requirements where, through classification of safety systems, they can use commercial-grade items, provided they move through a structured process to determine the component's safety significance. What we're doing further than that in these rules that we're developing under the executive order, we are taking that same concept to be able to apply flexibility so that designers of nuclear systems and applicants can really focus their attention on what is most important to safety in terms of the quality assurance requirements for safety-related components. So we already do that in our frameworks already, and we're taking that and expanding it further into the licensing process. Again, this is going to help you really accelerate the deployment safely, because we just want to make sure that the components that are most important to safety are the ones that have high levels of quality. There are other things that may have functions that are less important to safety, that commercial grade could be sufficient.

Rep. Pfluger: Chairman, as we've talked about here, there are several pieces of legislation that we passed in the past couple of years with the intent of allowing us to compete, to move quicker, to be more efficient. You've just answered several questions on that. What is it that will get us to that A+ grade? Because I'm worried about the amount of electrons that are being generated and the demand that we see increasing, that's a good problem for us to have, but we have to compete worldwide. And what gets us to the A+ level that we're not doing? Whether it's us or you or the Department of Energy.

Chairman Neih: Well, anything that gets to shovels in the ground to start in construction safely with NRC approvals of applications that come before us. We're doing the groundwork now to develop these licensing frameworks that are going to provide a wide variety of options for different types of use cases, deployment models, and design maturities to come to the NRC and experience a disciplined and predictable process with a robust safety decision. So those options are going to be available once we complete our rulemaking activities. The NRC, we're waiting for more applications. You know, we are open for business. We're developing the workforce and the technical competence to be able to do that, and under the executive director's leadership, we're implementing a structured and disciplined management model to really execute our safety mission with discipline.

Rep. Pfluger: What percentage of the grid in the future should be serviced by nuclear? What percentage of our grid should be serviced in a perfect world by the nuclear component?

Chairman Neih: I can't give a number there. I really think that's for the, you know, the energy providers, to really decide. But whatever they decide upon, if it's nuclear, we'll be ready for it.

Rep. Pfluger: I yield back, thank you.