Gov. Glenn Youngkin dropped one bombshell, figuratively speaking, when he announced in October 2022 that he’d like to see a small nuclear reactor — and that he’d like to see it built in Southwest Virginia.
He dropped another one last week when, at the tail end of an appearance in Abingdon, he told reporters that he no longer believed Southwest Virginia was the best location. He said other sites are “better suited for the first one.”
It’s time for everyone to take a deep breath. Let’s review some key facts that often get overlooked when we’re talking about this new species of reactors known as small modular reactors — small because they are, modular because the idea is they can be built off-site in a factory and shipped to wherever they’re going to be operating.
1. The governor doesn’t pick energy sites.
Youngkin is enthusiastic about SMR technology and would like to see Virginia be the first state to deploy one. But the governor’s not the one who gets to draw an X on a map and say “That’s where it will be.” The governor is a cheerleader, not a decider on this one. It’s utilities — which have to work through regulatory agencies — that pick the locations for energy sites, nuclear or otherwise. In this case, we’re talking about the state’s two biggest utilities: Dominion Energy, which already operates nuclear plants in Louisa and Surry counties; and Appalachian Power, whose parent company operates a nuclear plant in Michigan. They’re the ones we ought to be paying attention to. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) Nor are we privy to Dominion’s thinking any more than any other news organization that has bothered to ask it, but the logical place for a nuclear site was never in Southwest Virginia. Instead …
2. The logical place for a small reactor is one of Dominion’s existing nuclear plants.
Dominion has been further along in its SMR explorations than Appalachian. Dominion also has more need to generate additional electricity than Appalachian. Dominion serves the higher-growth eastern part of Virginia, including the part where the energy-hungry data center industry is concentrated, while Appalachian serves the lower-growth western part of Virginia. Todd Flowers, Dominion’s director of business development, told Cardinal News last year that the company was looking at sites across the state as potential locations for SMRs — including its two existing nuclear plants.
The North Anna site in Louisa County is already licensed for a third large reactor that has never been built. If I ran Dominion, I sure wouldn’t go inviting trouble by proposing to put a nuclear reactor at a brand new site, with all the neighborhood opposition that’s sure to stir up. Indeed, just the mere mention of a nuclear site has galvanized opposition in Southwest Virginia. I’d put it at one of the existing nuclear plants, where the security, transmission lines and workforce are already in place. I don’t run Dominion, so my opinion may not count for much, but the logic still seems sound.
3. The Department of Energy identified Halifax County as a good nuclear site.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy studied whether coal plants, either recently retired or about to be, would make good nuclear sites. It’s not that the department envisioned the plants themselves being converted to nuclear, but rather that those sites already had utility-scale transmission lines in place. That report also looked at other factors — among them, proximity to large bodies of water (good) and proximity to people (bad). In the end, the report found that 80% of the coal plants in the country would meet the initial criteria. However, the report identified only one coal-fired plant in Virginia as a good candidate for a nuclear site. The department didn’t name it, but through process of elimination, there’s only one site that fit the description: the Clover coal plant in Halifax County that’s jointly owned by Dominion and the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative.
This report doesn’t have any particular force of law; this was simply an academic study to explore the question of whether coal-fired sites could be used for nuclear, so folks in Halifax shouldn’t be rushing out to protest just yet. Still, it’s notable that the Clover plant made the list and not Dominion’s Virginia City hybrid energy site in Wise County. All that’s a long way of saying I’m not surprised by what the governor said — only that he said it.
While we’re talking nuclear, there are some other points worth making.
4. Small reactors are not ‘speculative’ technology. But their business model is.
I often see critics deride small modular reactors as “speculative” or “unproven.” This may be technically true but misses the point: We’ve had small nuclear reactors for a long time. At any given time, there are probably a bunch floating in Hampton Roads, on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers or submarines home-ported at the naval bases there. Small reactors aren’t unproven at all; we’ve just never had utilities use them to generate power. What’s unproven — and may be a bigger challenge than the technology — is the business model to make SMRs work on a commercial scale.
Conventional nuclear is horrendously expensive and takes a long time to build, which makes it even more expensive. The most recent nuclear reactors in the United States to go online were in Georgia: the Vogtle 3 and 4 units at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. Planning for those began in 2006, while construction began in 2013. Vogtle 3 was connected to the grid last year, Vogtle 4 just this month — each one seven years behind schedule. In all, they took 17 to 18 years from start to finish.
The theory behind SMRs is that they can be mass-produced in a factory, and that economy of scale will drive the cost down. That may be so — if there were enough orders for that kind of assembly-line production. Right now, though, there are no SMRs under construction anywhere in the United States — and while a lot of utilities are interested, few seem interested in going first unless they’re more certain that the economics will work out. (One exception is Energy Northwest in Washington state, which last year signed a deal for “up to 12” small modular reactors, but that particular SMR design is still awaiting approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) The problem is that unless there are multiple orders, the economics probably won’t work out. Maybe someday that will happen, but it hasn’t yet.
The technological analogy here may be the space shuttle: A small fleet of reusable spacecraft was supposed to drive down the cost of space travel. The problem is, we were never able to get enough shuttle flights to make them as cheap as they were projected to be.
5. There’s bipartisan support for nuclear power.
Somehow, energy has become political, and sometimes those power sources are partisan. Democrats are a lot more keen on renewables than Republicans are; Republicans are definitely more keen on natural gas or anything else that can be drilled or mined out of the ground. Conservatives have generally always been pro-nuclear, but so are a lot of liberals these days. Not all liberals, mind you. There remains some fervent opposition to nuclear in all forms, and it’s easy to understand why. If a wind turbine malfunctions, maybe you shred more birds than usual. If a nuclear plant malfunctions, you could get Chernobyl, although it should be noted that the actual Chernobyl meltdown was mostly due to lax Soviet-era designs and management. (I highly recommend the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” by the way.)
In any case, one of the biggest champions for nuclear power these days is a Democrat — President Joe Biden. The Biden administration this year approved $1.1 billion to keep California’s last nuclear power plant operating and has backed a $1.5 billion loan to restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan. When the administration named its long-awaited “tech hubs” last year, one of those was a nuclear-focused project in Idaho, home to the Idaho National Lab. Overseas, the administration has been enthusiastically touting small modular reactors in eastern Europe, which has long been dependent on coal. Biden is likely our most pro-nuclear power president since the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 left nuclear energy on the outs.
From the administration’s point of view, nuclear power is the only way the country can meet its ambitious climate goals — the concern is that we can’t build wind and solar fast enough to get there. Feel free to dispute that engineering — and it really is an engineering question, not an ideological one — but the point is that nuclear is no longer a traditional left-versus-right political split. In Virginia, state Sen. David Marsden, D-Fairfax County, has been a leading advocate for nuclear for the same reasons — he thinks it’s necessary to decarbonize the grid.
We have a governor’s race coming up next year, so it would be worth asking the candidates whether they share the current governor’s enthusiasm for SMRs. If they don’t, the logical question is how they intend to meet Virginia’s power demands without nuclear energy, particularly given the growing opposition to solar energy across rural Virginia, and our complete inability so far to find a profitable way to build a single on-shore wind farm.
6. Virginia is preparing for more nuclear power.
While SMRs may remain economically unproven — and none have been formally proposed — Virginia is acting as if they’re coming someday. In the past session of the General Assembly, the legislature passed bills — by Marsden and Del. Israel O’Quinn, R-Washington County — that would allow utilities to charge customers for the cost of developing SMRs. (The usual argument against such things: Ratepayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for utilities’ research and development. The argument in favor: That’s how every other company in the land works: they pass their costs on to customers.)
So maybe the first SMR won’t be in Southwest Virginia. Maybe there will never be one at all in Southwest Virginia. But the state is acting as if someday there will be some somewhere.