The NRC on April 30 published a notice of its intent to conduct scoping and gather information necessary to develop a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) for small-scale advanced nuclear reactors (ANRs). The proposed GEIS will “streamline the environmental review process for future small-scale advanced nuclear reactor environmental reviews.” The NRC foresees small-scale ANR applicants incorporating the GEIS by reference and including additional site-specific information in a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to streamline the NRC review process required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

In SECY-20-0020, the NRC Staff informed the Commission that it planned to use a plant parameter envelope (PPE) approach to bound small-scale ANR projects (see our March blog). The Staff will discuss the bounding thermal power and environmental footprint envelope during the scoping process.

The NRC has scheduled a webinar to discuss the scoping effort on May 28, and members of the public will be able to submit comments on scoping until June 30 (Docket ID NRC-2020-0101). The notice contains the registration information for the webinar.

We will continue to monitor the ANR GEIS development process.