Appalachian Power will begin periodically closing the Joshua Falls boat ramp on the James River outside Lynchburg next month as it works to evaluate the site’s suitability for a small modular nuclear reactor.
“To ensure the safety of crews and the public, access to the boat ramp and parking lot will be limited or may close for brief durations of 1 hour or less,” Appalachian Power said in a news release.
The electric utility suggests that people check its website, JFBoatRamp.com, and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources’ public boating access page for scheduled closures.
Appalachian said that because of the intermittent nature of the work and the weather, some closures might not be scheduled in advance. “Every effort is being made” to ensure the boat ramp and parking lot remain fully open on weekends and open with reduced parking on weekdays, the company said.
“We understand how important this boat ramp is to the public and surrounding communities,” Appalachian Power spokesperson George Porter said in the news release. “We will continue to work with all stakeholders to find the ideal solution that ensures safety for crews and recreational users of the James River.”
The boat ramp is in Campbell County, 9 miles downstream from Lynchburg. Appalachian’s parent company, American Electric Power, owns the property while the state Department of Wildlife Resources manages it.
Last year, Appalachian announced it had identified its Joshua Falls property as a potential location for a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR. The site’s existing infrastructure includes a 765-kilovolt electric substation and roads that can support moving equipment.
Crews will begin tree clearing and access road construction starting next month. Other work will include installing a meteorological tower and taking water and soil samples; it will continue throughout the year, the utility said.
SMRs are designed to be smaller and cheaper than traditional nuclear reactors. They are generally considered to have between 50 and 300 megawatts of generation capacity, compared to the average of around 1,000 megawatts found in a traditional reactor.
SMRs could be built off-site and shipped to a location, where multiple units could be installed together to meet a specific power generation requirement. They could be placed at locations that would be too small for a larger reactor.
In July, Dominion Energy announced plans to explore building an SMR at Lake Anna in Louisa County, where it already has an approximately 1,900-megawatt nuclear power plant.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
No commercial SMR has yet been built in the U.S. Any such plant that Appalachian or Dominion would build is considered to be at least a decade away from coming online.