Andy Hall, chief nuclear inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) told the Energy and Climate Change select committee (ECCC) the process for approving reactor designs does not discriminate against smaller projects and is the same regardless of size.
Other factors, including commercial considerations and EU law, are slowing down the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), Hall claims.
This was in contrast to what the ECCC heard in a previous session, when SMR developers from the US told MPs the deployment of the technology was being held up by a lengthy licensing process.
Hall said there “would not be a significant difference” between a generic design assessment (GDA) process for a SMR and the larger reactors.
He added: “The timescales are not being governed by ourselves and the GDA process, but being governed by other matters – commercial matters and European matters.
“We are not the limiting factor; these other significant issues have to be resolved to speed up the process.”
Hall also told MPs that a “scaled down version” or a reactor that already has GDA approval “would make the assessment process easier because a lot of the issue around it would have been examined when we examined the larger design”.