Issues relating to licensing and liability for small modular reactors in Africa

Abstract

The internationally accepted nuclear regulation policy is for each country to undertake first principle analysis and approvals for the technical design and operating rules, benchmarking against nationally determined regulations and standards that are aligned to the IAEA standards. This is largely due to the acceptance that the liability of any risk emanating from the operation of a nuclear power plant is the strict liability of the licensed operating company locally. This approach results in a very large national technical regulator with expensive foreign support along with a very large in-house engineering team in the licensee. While this is economically credible in a technically advanced country with an existing nuclear fleet (such as Canada) it is an extreme overhead on a African country considering the deployment of a limited number of SMRs. The paper discusses how it may be possible to create a pan-African regulation option for SMRs, possibly based on the African Union.