Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
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How is a Pre-Licensing Vendor Design Review Conducted?
The review process is divided into three phases:
- Phase 1: Pre-Licensing Assessment of Compliance with Regulatory Requirements: This phase involves an overall assessment of the vendor’s nuclear power plant design against the most recent CNSC design requirements for new nuclear power plants in Canada as indicated in Design of New Nuclear Power Plants (RD-337) document.
- Phase 2: Pre-Licensing Assessment for Any Potential Fundamental Barriers to Licensing: This phase goes into further details with a focus on identifying any potential fundamental barriers to licensing the vendor’s nuclear power plant design in Canada.
- Phase 3 Follow-up: In this phase, the vendor chooses to follow-up on certain aspects of Phase 2 findings by:
- seeking more information from the CNSC about a Phase 2 topic; and/or
- asking the CNSC to review activities taken by the vendor towards the reactor’s design readiness, following the completion of Phase 2.
Scope of a pre-licensing vendor design review
The review focuses on the following areas:
- Safety and engineering:
- high level safety principles including: defense in depth, classification of systems, structures and components, dose acceptance criteria
- Specific engineered systems:
- Fuel design and qualification
- Reactor control system and facilities
- Containment & Safety Important Civil Structures
- Reactor core nuclear design
- Means of reactor shutdown
- Emergency core cooling system and emergency heat removal systems
- Fire protection
- Other important aspects:
- Human factors
- Robustness
- Safeguards
- Security
- Safety analysis (deterministic and probabilistic)
- Beyond Design Basis Accidents (BDBA) and severe accident prevention and mitigation
- Out-of-core criticality
- Pressure-boundary design
- Radiation protection
- Vendor R&D program (as part of Phase 2)
- Management System of design process and QA in design and safety analysis
- Decommissioning in Design
