Getting from “here to there” seems like a great way to geographically describe my recent road trip to UVA-Wise for the Nuclear Energy 101 forum, as well as asking, “How do we get from ‘here to there’ in our energy generation choices over the next 10-15 years?”
Last month, I drove to Buena Vista, my boyhood home in Rockbridge County, for the “Between the Lines Book Club,” where I was joined by 12-15 community members at St. John’s Methodist Church to discuss my book “Virginia Grit” and the current hyper-partisan political environment. After a thought-provoking two-hour discussion, it was time to get back on I-81 for almost another four hours down past Roanoke, Blacksburg, Wytheville, through Abingdon and up into the mountains to Wise.
The Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium (VNEC) was hosting a one-day, fact-filled community forum on nuclear energy. As the senior member of the Loudoun County delegation, where we have over 200 operating or approved data centers that create immense demands on the grid, it has become important for me to become knowledgeable on energy, land and water use, air quality, emergency backup generators, etc. It’s a complex industry that we use every minute of every day and touches on so many policy issues.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)
Since the 1970s, the backbone of nuclear power in Virginia has been the full-scale, purpose-built, light-water reactors (LWR) at Surry and North Anna — these four reactors currently provide about 30% of Virginia’s power needs, but are the complete opposite of small modular reactors (SMRs). To build these massive plants today would require tens of billions of dollars and almost 15 years to permit and construct. For example, Georgia’s Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the first new large reactors built in more than 30 years, took over 14 years to complete and ultimately cost more than $30 billion. Projects of this scale are increasingly out of step with protecting ratepayers from enormous cost overruns.
While light-water reactors have dominated large-scale nuclear design for the past 70 years, there are at least 10 small modular reactor technologies working their way through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s rigorous regulatory review process. And as was pointed out during the forum, “The NRC is the gold standard for regulation and safety.”
Despite all the hype, there is currently no approved SMR design in the U.S., and there is no commercial SMR under construction. There are prototypes being built at national labs in a highly controlled environment. According to Dominion, the first 300-megawatt SMR may be deployed at North Anna by 2033. While that’s eight years away and seems imminent, we need to be realistic — it’s a new technology that exists nowhere in the U.S. Both technological and policy hurdles could easily shift that timeline to 2035 or even 2040.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
‘Fusion has been 20 years away for 50 years’ — … maybe now is different
In December 2024, Gov. Youngkin made a big announcement that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) agreed to deploy the first 400-megawatt commercial fusion reactor in Chesterfield in “the early 2030s.”
Unlike SMRs, which have 70 years of light water fission reactor experience to draw upon for their various designs, there’s no such comparative baseline for controlled fusion reactors. Even though CFS’s technological advances seem promising, they’ve secured over $3.0 billion in funding and their prototype SPARC reactor is currently being built, this is still trying to control the physics that powers the sun to create clean energy on Earth.
Since the dawn of the nuclear age, fusion has been the “Holy Grail” of clean energy, but since those early days, “fusion has been 20 years away for 50 years.” If we truly are on the cusp of significant technological breakthroughs that make fusion viable and repeatable, the governor’s promise of “the early 2030s” could still become 2035 or 2040.
Getting from ‘here to there’
Regardless of whether we’re counting on SMRs or an ARC fusion reactor to meet our future clean energy requirements, realistically, both technologies are still at least 10-15 years away from the deployment of their first 300- or 400-megawatt unit — just the first unit. Then we’ll need to learn whether these new technologies are truly modular and how quickly they can scale to the deployment of unit two, unit three and beyond.
In the meantime, LEGO, AstraZeneca, Microporus, Newport News Shipyard, data centers, electrification of the transportation sector, transition to electric heat pumps, etc., will continue to place increasing demands on the grid. Our challenge is how we bridge the gap over the next 10-15 years with the most cost-effective, most ratepayer-friendly and cleanest possible energy sources necessary to power our ever-growing, highly interconnected, modern economy.
Reid is a member of the House of Delegates from Loudoun County. He is a Democrat.