Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel announce nuclear-plant partnership

Babcock & Wilcox is teaming up with one of the nation’s largest engineering companies, Bechtel, to design and build power plants that would use the mPower small reactor that B&W announced a year ago, the two companies announced Wednesday.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., called the partnership “an exciting thing to see” because it offered an opportunity for American leadership in advancing clean energy worldwide in places that can’t afford, or don’t need, full-size reactors.

“This will allow us to move forward in the area of energy independence,” Webb said during a news conference in Washington.

Engineering work on the “Generation mPower” reactor itself will continue to be done in Lynchburg, said Chris Mowry, president of Babcock & Wilcox Nuclear Energy Inc.

“We do see additional engineering resources being brought into Lynchburg,” Mowry added, although he wouldn’t say when or from where they might come.

Other B&W employees in Charlotte, N.C., and Frederick, Md., also will be designing the 125-megawatt reactor. Once federal approvals of the design are obtained and contracts with utilities are signed, some reactor components, and possibly fuel units, possibly could be built in Lynchburg, B&W officials said.

B&W hopes to build the first of the reactors by 2020 and use the experience from those reactors to develop a nearly off-the-shelf model that could be duplicated in many places.

Electricity providers who purchase those reactors would save money and time by dealing with just one builder — the partnership formed by B&W and Bechtel, Mowry said.

Bechtel’s role in the partnership is the design and construction of those parts of the electricity-generating plants that would be powered by the reactors.

Webb’s role involves a public-private aspect to the plan.

Webb, along with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., introduced legislation last year that would provide $200 million per year for five years for a cost-sharing mechanism between government and the nuclear industry to bring small reactors to market. The legislation also would guarantee $100 billion in loans to develop carbon-free energy.

Webb said the B&W-Bechtel partnership could “strengthen our workforce with high-paying jobs on U.S. soil.”

The alliance announced Wednesday also included a consortium of about a dozen small power companies that are interested in the mPower-reactor concept.

One of those was a Virginia company, the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative.

“It’s something we want to be part of,” said Jeb Hockman, spokesman for Old Dominion.

“It’s a startup kind of thing, but we need all the energy we can get from everything from nuclear to fossil fuel to renewables,” Hockman said.

Mowry said he thought “the success of mPower, and the success of small modular reactor innovations, depends ultimately on credibility.” That credibility must be established with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with Congress, with utility companies that could buy the reactors, and with investors who purchase stock in those companies, Mowry said.