Nuclear designs from the last 50 years can finally be licensed on their own terms

US nuclear regulators are changing the rules for how new nuclear power plants get approved. This means that advanced reactor designs, which are different from the ones built in the 1960s, will no longer have to fit into old safety categories.

For 50 years, every new reactor design had to prove it was safe using methods written for 1960s light-water technology. This was an expensive, slow process that effectively blocked anything genuinely different. This change means a company with a new design can now be assessed on its own terms, potentially speeding up approvals and lowering costs for novel reactor types.