U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
An artist’s rendering of a NuScale small modular nuclear reactor
This article appears in the December 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Is it good to be first? In early November, Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced his nuclear “moon shot” plan, a major public-private energy project to build small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Energy DELTA Lab, a nonprofit initiative, spearheads the effort, along with the state’s Southwest Virginia Energy Research and Development Authority, InvestSWVA, and the Virginia Department of Energy. Private partners, including the energy companies Appalachian Power and Dominion Energy, which owns the state’s two conventional nuclear plants, are also on board.
SMRs have never been deployed commercially in the United States, and Youngkin wants Virginia to be first out of the gate. At the same time, it appears that the less workaday people in Southwest Virginia know about those plans the better. How else to explain that state and county officials have not held a single public forum about SMRs and associated projects expected to launch in ten years?
Energy DELTA Lab plans to research and develop a next-generation nuclear energy source along with other new clean and renewable energy technologies through more than 12 projects, with the goal of providing about one gigawatt of power. The proposal, which would take shape on 65,000 acres of former Wise County coal mine lands, would create 1,650 jobs.
The administration’s press release about the plan did not specifically mention SMRs. But the Energy DELTA Lab website indicates that SMRs are in the mix for the multibillion-dollar project. An SMR is an advanced design that is basically a scaled-down version of the light water reactors found in conventional nuclear plants. Individual modules can produce up to 300 megawatts of carbon-free electricity and be factory-manufactured, transported, and assembled at power plant sites, which cuts down on costs. The plan also includes spent nuclear fuel recycling, another national first if the Virginia project can pull it off. According to the federal Office of Nuclear Energy, the United States “does not currently recycle spent nuclear fuel.”
Also included are an estimated 10 to 12 data centers, the computer server networks that are the neural hubs of the internet. Energy DELTA Lab’s website calls the location “the most significant economic development project the region has ever seen.” “That’s a major policy shift that feels like it should have some type of citizen input before it’s finalized,” says Wally Smith, vice president of the Clinch Coalition, a local environmental group.
Being first out of the gate on nuclear energy projects is risky. One week after the DELTA Energy Lab announcement, NuScale, the country’s leading SMR developer, which has interests in the Virginia plan, and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), an interlocal state agency that supplies energy services, canceled their SMR project. Scheduled to go online by 2030, the 462-megawatt “Carbon Free Power Project” had already suffered major setbacks. Prices for power had doubled, and a number of towns pulled out of the agreement.
Data centers demand massive amounts of energy, which likely spurred interest in co-location with SMRs.
The development is a “railroad track warning signal for SMR design,” says David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio-based think tank. He believes that Utah “dodged a financial disaster.” UAMPS also serves towns in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. “Communities don’t want to tie their fate to expensive new technologies where there is a risk that costs will go up dramatically,” Schlissel says.
With this huge deal in the works, shouldn’t residents get clued in? In a November Cardinal News op-ed, April Wade, executive director of the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium, another public-private group of “stakeholders,” stressed that “no site has been selected” and that “in the case of any site eventually considered, there will be ample time for public comment.” The project has gone pretty far already. That seven proposed sites are already on the table came as a surprise to local residents.
Good citizen engagement means “mostly being transparent, providing information, being proactive, letting people feel like they have a stake far in advance,” says John E. Parsons, deputy director for research at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
As far as political support goes, many of the region’s local officials and state lawmakers are on board with Youngkin’s moon shot. But the governor’s recent moves backhand the very voters who went massively for him in 2021. Sharon Fisher, the Clinch Coalition president, has been canvassing Wise and Scott County residents about the project. Most of the people she talked to hadn’t heard anything about it. When more than 60 people showed up to an October town hall convened by the coalition and four other regional groups, many of them knew nothing about it either. No local or state officials attended or spoke at the event, according to the organizers.
Five generations of Fisher’s family mined coal. She grew up in Dorothy, West Virginia, “a coal camp,” or company town. So she scoffs when “nukers,” as she calls the nuclear energy proponents, say it’s too early for public forums. Failing to address residents’ fears about higher energy costs, safety, and health and environmental issues like radioactive waste storage (controversies also surround SMR-generated nuclear waste) will complicate future discussions. For Fisher, it’s long past time to collect citizen input. “[The governor] came, announced it, and said we’re doing it,” Fisher says. “You’re not engaging the people, the public—that has been our mantra for the past year.”
Announced last October, Youngkin’s energy plan is the centerpiece of the administration’s “all of the above” approach to natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, and hydrogen. Even though it touts the “largest planned offshore wind project in the Free World,” the nearly $10 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project to power 660,000 homes, it otherwise largely downplays renewables.
On the climate question, Youngkin minimized the Virginia Clean Economy Act introduced under his Democratic predecessor Ralph Northam. His plan, by contrast, deems the 2045 goal set for complete decarbonization unrealistic and largely pivots away from renewables, citing intermittency problems and the new storage technologies and transmission upgrades that they require. Instead, Youngkin’s plan leans into state-of-the art nuclear options—but ones that also wouldn’t be available for many years, if ever, which fails to advance the emissions cuts necessary for the U.S. to reach its climate goals.
THE PLAN’S BACKWARD-LOOKING APPROACH was in line with Youngkin’s decision to yank Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. He cited increased costs that Dominion, the state’s largest investor-owned utility, passed on to residential and business consumers; the state’s Department of Planning and Budget reported that consumers could save $676 per household if the state remained in RGGI through 2030. Tellingly, Dominion and NuScale got a shout-out in the state energy plan.
Not surprisingly as far as residents were concerned, the governor also unveiled his energy framework under a cloak of invisibility at an invitation-only event. “Community members and other stakeholders were not informed about the announcement nor were asked to contribute comments,” the Virginia Council on Environmental Justice observed in its 2022 annual report.
If the Youngkin plan undermined renewables in Virginia, the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission’s (the acronym for Lee, Wise, Scott Counties and the city of Norton) SMR feasibility study summed up Southwest Virginia’s curb appeal as “ample brownfield sites, low regional population density, and significant land with low environmental regulatory burden,” as if there weren’t enough humans or wildlife living there to matter much.
EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AP PHOTO
Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s all-of-the-above energy approach downplays solar and wind and embraces state-of-the-art nuclear options.
Although Duane Miller, the executive director of the commission, has said that the group plans public forums next year, the current plans for nuclear facilities, avoiding dialogues with residents about the sites and the costs, have raised multiple red flags. Many communities are still trying to move away from extractive business models. Bullit Mine, a possible SMR site, is near the town of Appalachia. With the decline of coal mining, the high-poverty, low-income community has been working on establishing a new identity as an outdoor recreation destination, which new rounds of construction activity could compromise.
Wise County Administrator Michael Hatfield told The Washington Post in February that a possible SMR location, such as a hilltop, means that a site “is not going to be near anybody’s back yard.” But Mineral Gap in Wise County, another proposed SMR site, is near UVA’s Wise College and hundreds of feet away from a school playground and a drinking water source, Smith says. Another possible site in Dickenson County is near the Red Onion State Prison. Over time, some mine lands have turned into wetlands that provide critical habitats for wood ducks and other resident and migratory birds as well as spotted salamanders and mountain chorus frogs, two species at risk because of habitat loss.
There are also concerns about the stability of mine lands and constructing buildings on them. Virginia Cooperative Extension papers raise the issue of construction on reclaimed mine lands: “All recently reclaimed land in surface mined areas should be considered as potentially unstable ground.” Builders would need to implement special procedures to deal with ground settlement and other geologic features to avoid future damage to buildings. Stabilizing these lands could raise construction costs. Future environmental reviews would need to take these issues into consideration.
FEDERAL ENERGY DOLLARS HEIGHTEN the region’s investment appeal. The Biden administration has provided funding for regional abandoned mine land projects through the bipartisan infrastructure law; in the program’s first year, Virginia received $23 million. The Department of Energy has steered millions to SMR projects, and NuScale and other companies have been among the beneficiaries. LENOWISCO, the regional planning agency, could also access Inflation Reduction Act tax credits for SMRs.
But data centers demand massive amounts of energy and land, which likely spurred the Youngkin administration’s interest in co-location with SMRs in the Southwest. Northern Virginia currently has the largest concentration of data centers on the planet—and attendant local land use controversies. A plan to house nearly 30 million square feet of data centers on about 2,100 acres in Prince William County has pitted historical and archeological preservationists, among others, against local officials and others keen to reap the tax revenues and “world-leading” technology cachet that neighboring Loudoun County now enjoys. Using the unrealized promise of SMRs to attract data centers would be an expensive proposition.
“I would love to see private investment get this further along before we start betting ratepayer dollars,” says Nate Benforado, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “To me, it still seems like we’re in sort of this early R&D stage.”
Monopoly utilities’ nuclear projects in the Southeast have track records of construction delays, cost overruns, and in some cases, outright failures. Georgia Power’s notorious Plant Vogtle project in Waynesboro, Georgia, finally began generating power in April, seven years late and $17 billion over budget. And now there’s the NuScale-UAMPS case. (The Department of Energy had allocated $1.3 billion over the next ten years to the plan.) The technology isn’t moving fast anywhere else either. The only SMR in operation in the world is a floating SMR facility in northern Russia. “Cost is something that people need to be worried about,” says Parsons of MIT. “It’s really important for your public regulators to do their due diligence and to protect ratepayers. There’s no reason to make your average customer in Southwest Virginia pay a larger electric bill.”
Democratic control of the Virginia legislature (the Democrats flipped the House of Delegates in the 2023 elections) could affect Youngkin’s SMR designs. Some Democrats have supported nuclear investments; others favor concentrating on wind and solar projects. State lawmakers need to take a long hard look at the NuScale-UAMPS failure before moving forward with the SMR segment of this energy project. “The history of the nuclear industry has been a series of unpleasant surprises,” says Schlissel.
The governor’s SMR public strategy appears to be based on finalizing as much as possible before residents can raise questions or, worse, object. Smith, of the Clinch Coalition, a self-described agnostic on nuclear energy, calls for more fact-finding and public engagement from state and local officials instead of relying on the “promotional noise” of press releases.
Plus, the residents of coal country who have borne those environmental and social burdens for decades are now faced with another extractive scheme. “Plowing ahead and not involving those community members while saying, ‘Look, we’re going to come and put this new project here that potentially carries environmental and safety risks’ was really problematic,” Smith says. “I don’t think it’s really moving the needle away from our historic mode of economic development, which is, if you live here, there’s a small, outside group of individuals who are going to make decisions for you.”
