The day began with a salute to the flag and a song to stir the hearts of visitors. With investments of over $65 million and more than $200,000 in state tax incentives, BWX – a major employer in Lynchburg’s – said it was ready to answer Governor Glenn Youngkin’s challenge. Last year he proposed what he called a moonshot – to create a small modular nuclear reactor that could be made in a factory and distributed across the country, supplying the power he’s sure will be needed.
“With every data center, with every advanced manufacturing plant that is built, with every indoor farm, with every step to electrify our economy, the power demand in Virginia and the nation nearly doubles,” Youngkin told a crowd at the grand opening of the facility.
The president of BWXT, Rex Geveden, says the firm has experience in that area.
“We power every submarine, every aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet. We are trying to provide for global security, the production of clean energy, the exploration and settlement of space," he explained. "If you can't get excited about those missions than something's wrong."
But the company has competition from more than a dozen other firms that have designed small reactors, and all of them will produce radioactive waste. Stanford physicist Amory Lovins, known as the Einstein of Energy Efficiency, worries about that.
“Either you’re trucking a lot of it around – which is then prone to accidents or attacks – or you’re storing it where it is, in which case you have a lot of nuclear waste repositories all over the country.”
No one knows which companies will make it to the finish line or how well their products will work. Nor can we say how long it might take for them to assure regulators and the public that these new reactors are safe? And with climate change threatening the planet’s existence, Lovins says nuclear is not the answer.
“The more worried you are about climate, the more important it is to have cheap, fast and sure options rather than costly, slow and speculative ones.”
At the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Dennis Wamsted agrees.
“Texas is a great example. They’re building wind, solar and battery storage. There are parts of the day when they don’t need all that electricity, so you pump that electricity into a battery. You can keep it there for when you need it in the evening when demand goes up and the sun goes down, and then, in most places, wind tends to pick up overnight.”
Governor Youngkin has spoken of the need to supply a growing number of data centers with power 24/7, but Lovins is skeptical. He thinks data centers could be a hundred times more energy efficient if governments required that, and he gives credit to industry for selling the idea of small modular reactors to politicians and the public.
“This is the fourth time I can think of that a kind of mass hysteria has been whipped up in a matter of months. The first three were by the coal industry, saying that information technology is going to eat the grid. We have to build more coal plants or we’ll run out of power and the lights will go out. This one is probably promoted, if I had to guess, by the gas and nuclear interests.”
Finally, some economists say small reactors will produce pricier power than what we get from bigger plants, wind or solar. That’s why Wamsted says the choice for Virginia is clear.
“If I was the governor of Virginia, I would be encouraging Dominion to build all of the offshore wind it possibly could, and you ship the power on shore via a buried transmission line, so you don’t have to worry about building new transmission, which is a huge issue, and it’s going to be providing power more than 50% of the time.”
During the last legislative session, lawmakers approved a bill to expand workforce training and professional development for the offshore wind industry. in March, Governor Youngkin vetoed it.
