Nice conspiracy theory there.

As a guy who is instinctively against conspiracy theories, allow me to bring arguments against this one.

First, we live in a country of laws. NRC follows the laws, not because it has noble intentions, but because it is not an actual organism, but a collection of people, and individually people don't like to break the law. People will just try to do their job, and if they don't see an explicit (i.e. written) mandate somewhere that they need to prevent nuclear power plants from being built, then they won't do it.

Second, if they really wanted to do that, they would have kept the way they were doing business in the 70s. But they worked hard to come up with an approval process based on probabilistic risk assessment [1]. It took them 13 years to build this framework (between 1994 and 2007). In the old framework, if some undesirable event was possible, then the approval would not come, even if the probability of that event was one in one quadrillion. That was the absolutely perfect framework to shut down an industry. Why did they move away from it?

Third, they just gave NuScale an approval for their small modular reactor design. You can find all the papers related to the approval here [2]. NuScale provided 12000 pages of documents as part of their application, plus 2 million more pages as supporting evidence for the NRC audits. It took them 2 million man-hours of effort over about 7 years to get this approval.

Now, take a look at communication between NRC and NuScale during the approval process [3]:

For Chapter 15, there are numerous unresolved issues without a mutually understood and clearly defined path toward resolution at this time. These issues are related to the underlying methodologies used in the NuScale design basis accident analyses, the thermal-hydraulic and neutronic phenomena modeled in the analyses for long-term cooling and post-shutdown return to power, and recent changes to the NRELAP5 design basis accident analysis tool and supporting input models. Related to Chapters 3 and 15, NuScale submitted a letter dated December 14, 2018 (ADAMS Accession No. ML18351A145), discussing the application of the single failure criterion to the inadvertent actuation block valve. On April 11, 2019, the NRC staff issued SECY-19-0036, “Application of the Single Failure Criterion to NuScale Power, LLC's Inadvertent Actuation Block Valves” (ADAMS Accession No. ML19060A162), requesting Commission direction. Once the Commission provides direction on this policy matter, or sooner, NuScale and the staff will need to act promptly to bring the issue to closure. For each of these issues, the NRC staff and NuScale continue to engage to reach alignment on a clear path toward resolution. The NRC staff expects NuScale to submit its responses by mid-June to support resolution of the Chapter 15 issues.

If NRC wanted to not give an approval, this statement would be the exact place to start shutting the door in NuScale's face. If they said NuScale did not address their concerns regarding the "single failure criterion to the inadvertent actuation block valve", who was NuScale going to appeal to?

So, no, sorry, I don't buy your conspiracy theory.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/risk-informed/histo...

[2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...

[3] https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-fall-2020/pr...