Cardinal News: Then & Now takes a look back at the stories we brought you over the last 12 months. Through the end of the year, we’re sharing updates on some of the people and issues that made news in 2024. This installment: Framatome’s ongoing expansion in Lynchburg.
A year after it first announced a multimillion-dollar expansion, the nuclear services firm Framatome has hired about a quarter of its anticipated 500-plus new jobs and is progressing with new construction in Lynchburg.
Framatome provides equipment, fuel and maintenance services for nuclear power plants. Officials there are optimistic that the coming years will see a new surge of support for the commercial nuclear industry.
“The wave is building, the wave is coming. We have to be prepared for it, so we’re going out and hiring and investing now,” Tony Robinson, president and CEO of Framatome Inc., said in an interview.
The company late last year announced it would invest $49.4 million in its Lynchburg-area facilities and hire 515 new employees. It already employs about 1,300 in the region.
In April, Framatome held a groundbreaking for the expansion at its facility on Lynchburg’s Mill Ridge Road, which is one of three company locations in the region. The French firm has its North American headquarters on Old Forest Road and a testing and service facility on Mt. Athos Road in Campbell County.
Today, Framatome has hired about 130 of its anticipated new Lynchburg-area employees, with a goal of having the rest on board by 2027. It’s also adding 200 new jobs at its nuclear fuel manufacturing facility in Richlands, Washington.
At the Mill Ridge Road site, it’s building a two-story office building and a technical training center geared toward small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs.
Last December, Gov. Glenn Youngkin visited Framatome’s North American headquarters to announce the expansion, saying that “what really feeds an economy is reliable, affordable and increasingly clean power.”
New construction, new jobs are focus of expansion
Framatome’s expansion has three parts, said Dominique Grandemange, vice president of operational support for the company’s installed base business unit in North America.
First, Framatome is constructing a two-story, 24,000-square-foot building to hold 200 additional employees. The company is on track to have that facility occupied by the middle of next year.
Second, Framatome will renovate its current 60,000-square-foot Mill Ridge Road building, which is about 30 years old. The to-do list includes replacing the roof, replacing the heating and cooling system and implementing a variety of modern upgrades.
“We’re going to bring into this facility what we’ll have in the new facility, so more open spaces, collaborative spaces,” Grandemange said. “We’re going to try to bring more light inside the workplace to make it more engaging, attractive, and this is part of creating that environment to attract and retain the people that we need for the future.”
The company plans to start that renovation in the second half of next year and finish by the end of 2027.
Third, Framatome is building a 10,000-square-foot technical training center with a focus on training employees to service small modular nuclear reactors.
SMRs are designed to be smaller and cheaper than traditional large nuclear power plants, with, for example, a generation capacity of 300 megawatts each rather than 1,000 megawatts.
Framatome plans to begin construction on the new training center around the middle of next year and finish by the middle of 2026.
The company already has a training center focused on teaching technicians how to maintain larger nuclear power plants. It features simulations of instrument and control systems, reactor vessels and other pieces and parts found inside power plants.
It’s complemented by the recently relaunched Nuclear Training Academy at Central Virginia Community College, through which students can earn an associate’s degree while working full time at Framatome.
The new training center at Mill Ridge Road will be designed for teaching employees about multiple designs of SMR. Plans call for it to stand about 74 feet tall, with a simulated spent fuel pool that’s about 70 feet deep.
“This is really to recreate what people or technicians are going to find when they go maintain those kinds,” Grandemange said. “That’s really unique. I don’t know anyone else in the industry who is going to have that type of asset … and that, I think, is going to position us very well for servicing those SMRs in the future.”
As electricity demand rises, nuclear moves into spotlight again
Framatome’s expansion comes as nuclear power is being considered anew as a potential solution to rising electricity demand.
Most U.S. nuclear power plants were built between 1970 and 1990. In the years after that, few new nuclear reactors have come online.
One recent exception is at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle, where two new units have begun operating since last year. Another is at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar plant, which started up its second unit in 2016, marking the country’s first new nuclear reactor in 20 years.
In the early 2000s, Robinson said, it appeared the stage was set for a “nuclear renaissance,” in large part due to rising energy prices.
But multiple factors intervened, including the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, the rise of shale oil and fracking that lowered the cost of fossil fuels, and the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, he said.
Today, Robinson said, “Things have changed.”
Forecasts show a rapidly increasing demand for electricity.
“The driving factors behind that are basically the hyperscalers. It’s the data centers. It’s artificial intelligence,” he said.
Virginia is home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, which supply computing power and data storage for a variety of businesses and internet services.
Dominion Energy, which is the commonwealth’s largest electric utility, has said its power demand is forecast to double by 2039 largely due to those data centers.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
And a recently released state report forecasts Virginia’s electricity consumption nearly tripling by 2040 if data center growth continues unconstrained.
Robinson said no single form of electricity generation can meet that demand. He favors an “all of the above” approach that includes other methods such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power.
It’s a philosophy that’s been espoused by others including Youngkin, who has pushed for the development of new nuclear power during visits to Southwest Virginia and elsewhere.
Robinson said nuclear is the “perfect solution” for large electricity users such as data centers because it supplies power 24/7 — what the energy industry refers to as baseload power, as opposed to the intermittent power generation of solar and wind.
Nuclear power supplies about 20% of the United States’ electricity and about 31% of Virginia’s.
The Biden administration last month outlined a plan to deploy 200 gigawatts of new nuclear energy, nearly tripling the nation’s capacity.
“The net new capacity gains are anticipated to come from multiple sources, including building new nuclear power plants, uprating existing reactors, and restarting reactors that have retired for economic reasons,” the White House said in a news release.
The plan calls for short-term targets of 35 gigawatts of new capacity by 2035 and establishing a sustained pace of 15 gigawatts per year by 2040. For comparison, the United States’ current nuclear generation capacity totals about 100 gigawatts.
Looking ahead to nuclear power’s future
It remains to be seen what nuclear-energy policies President-elect Donald Trump will support when he takes office as the country’s 47th president on Jan. 20.
In August, he vowed to support new nuclear reactors on “day one,” but in October he criticized nuclear plants for being “too big, and too complex and too expensive,” according to the energy-industry publication Utility Dive.
During Trump’s first term, he supported the nuclear industry with loan guarantees and by signing legislation that established a regulatory pathway for new advanced nuclear reactor designs such as SMRs.
No commercial SMR has yet been deployed in the United States. NuScale Corp. has the only SMR design certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but in November 2023 it announced it was canceling its plan to build six 77-megawatt modules in Idaho, citing inflation and increased construction costs.
This past summer, Dominion Energy announced that it plans to develop an SMR at its North Anna power plant in Louisa County.
Appalachian Power said last month that it’s exploring building an SMR near an existing electric substation on the James River in Campbell County.
Even if Virginia’s two largest electric utilities meet all the necessary regulatory approvals, their SMRs likely won’t go online for at least a decade.
And as the utilities seek approval for the projects, they will almost certainly face questions about how development costs will impact customers, how nuclear waste material will be handled and other concerns.
If commercial SMRs do go from the drawing board to reality, Framatome plans to be ready.
Rather than designing its own SMR, Framatome plans to be prepared to service any other company’s design with maintenance, nuclear fuel, instrument and control systems and other products and services.
“We’ve taken an alternative approach in that in lieu of being a reactor developer, we’ve determined that we provide unique and niche technology to the market that we do best,” Robinson said.