On 29 June 2021, in response to the call of the European nuclear industry and the Research & Development & Innovation (R&D&I) community, the European Commission organized a first EU Workshop on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). A major outcome of this workshop was the endorsement of a 'vision paper' widely supported by the stakeholders. It includes a proposal for a European SMR Partnership (‘the Partnership’) in the form of a collaboration scheme involving industrial stakeholders, nuclear safety regulators, research & technological organisations, interested customers (i.e. utilities and even Member States) as well as European policy-makers with the aim at creating enabling conditions for the first European SMRs starting operation in the initial years of the next decade.
In 2022, in the frame of the Partnership preparations, a Workstream was created with the support of ENSREG. The main objective of this European SMR pre-Partnership Workstream (WS2) was to identify the elements for establishing a European pre-licensing process based on commonly accepted safety assessments from different ENSREG members interested in the licensing of the same SMR design. ENSREG Members had nominated 20 experts from 15 EU countries to the WS2, one industry representative from ENISS also participated.
This report presents the work and analyses performed by this group of experts from early 2022 to Spring 2023.
The report has been revised on 21 June 2024.
