A recently formed partnership in Virginia will look at the potential for creating a research facility that would include a micro-scale nuclear reactor for businesses and universities to use as they develop the next generation of nuclear power plants.
The partnership — organized by a nonprofit called the Virginia Innovative Nuclear Hub, or VIN Hub — also aims to bring together Virginia’s nuclear companies and universities to research materials for advanced nuclear reactors.
Virginia recently awarded VIN Hub $1.2 million for these two projects. The overarching goals are to grow Virginia’s nuclear-energy research and training infrastructure and help draw investment from the nuclear sector to the commonwealth.
“As we build out these capabilities and bring visibility to them, it will be a talent attractor for us as well, not only from an academic standpoint but also for researchers, and for students and for workers,” said VIN Hub Executive Director Jeff Whitt.
Whitt was named in February to lead the organization, which counts nuclear-industry companies, Virginia higher-education institutions and state government among its partners. Previously, he worked for Framatome, a French nuclear-services company that has its North American headquarters in Lynchburg, employs about 1,300 people in the Lynchburg region and is a VIN Hub partner.
VIN Hub will use $750,000 of the recently awarded $1.2 million to begin planning the Virginia Research and Education Reactor Facility. Its location and price tag have yet to be determined. Figuring out those details and others, including how exactly it would best serve its users, will be part of VIN Hub’s work over the next year.
Whitt said that it’s too early to say how large the test micro-scale reactor would be but that it would be on a smaller scale than a conventional nuclear reactor, perhaps up to 5 megawatts.
For context, Dominion’s North Anna power plant in Louisa County has two reactors that total about 1,900 megawatts. North Anna and Dominion’s 1,600-megawatt Surry County plant together account for about one-third of the electricity generated in Virginia.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
While Virginia has been home to research reactors in the past, such as at Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, none are operating in the commonwealth today.
“If you sit down and look at the increasing demands that we have for new nuclear, advanced materials, technologies — the research and the testing needs that can be served with the test reactor are pretty big,” Whitt said.
Having such a facility in Virginia would reduce the need to use testing services at national laboratories, which can have long wait times, Whitt said.
And while other states have nuclear research reactors, many are managed by a single entity, such as a university. Whitt said he believes that VIN Hub’s collaborative model would be unique in the U.S.
Meanwhile, VIN Hub will use $462,000 of the recently awarded funding to develop a collaboration called the Virginia Center for Nuclear Materials and Reliability. This likely would not be a physical facility but rather an establishment of working relationships among industry and academic stakeholders.
The goal is to research materials to be used in next-generation reactors to study how best to prevent them from degrading. For example, some advanced reactor designs call for using liquid metals or molten salts as coolants, which could corrode or otherwise weaken the reactor’s structure.
The latest round of state money comes from the Virginia Department of Energy’s Virginia Power Innovation Program, which has also backed projects to improve safety for electrical line workers and prolong the life of transformers. The same program provided VIN Hub with $350,000 in seed funding last year.
VIN Hub grew out of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2022 energy plan, which called for an “all-of-the-above” approach to developing new sources of electricity, and the work of the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium, or VNEC, a membership organization established by the General Assembly in 2013 to promote nuclear power.
VIN Hub partners include VNEC; the Virginia Energy Workforce Consortium, a member organization representing a variety of energy companies; Framatome; Dominion; Newport News-based Huntington Ingalls Industries, which produces nuclear-powered ships for the military; and the Virginia Department of Energy.
VIN Hub also has academic representation from the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, Liberty University and Virginia’s community colleges.
“Virginia has excellent opportunities for students interested in a role in nuclear energy, and VIN Hub will ensure the technologies they work on as students and researchers will be advanced in the state where they were developed,” Alireza Haghighat, director of Virginia Tech’s nuclear engineering program and a vice chair of VNEC, said last month in a news release from Youngkin’s office announcing the latest round of funding.