Initial pre-licensing activities with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) is centred on AECL’s core Advanced CANDU Reactor, the ACR-1000, given the strong opportunity for this product in Canada. AECL has also started work with the CNSC to define pre-licensing activities relating to the Enhanced CANDU 6 design.

CNSC staff are reviewing selected ACR-1000 documents and providing feedback to AECL on the design and analysis basis, licensing basis, methodology, R&D, design requirements, etc. CNSC pre-licensing review does not culminate in issuing a construction licence, but provides a statement of licensability, i.e., confirms that there are no fundamental barriers to licensing the ACR-1000 design in Canada. AECL expects that current pre-licensing activities will smoothly transition to ACR-1000 licensing once Ontario Government and utility decisions on a new build in Ontario are made.

As part of the international licensing initiative for ACR, groups of Chinese regulatory staff are performing visits to the CNSC to assess the ACR against the Chinese licensing requirements and to get introduced with the CNSC pre-licensing and licensing processes.

In the U.S., AECL and AECL Technologies successfully completed the two-year-long Familiarization and Issue Identification Phases of the U.S. licensing review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). AECL plans to bring this pre-application work to completion, to position ACR technology to be ready for future Design Certification in the USA.