Duke Energy has asked federal regulators to approve the idea of using part of its Belews Creek property in Stokes County as the site for a set of small nuclear reactors.
The utility on Tuesday applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an “early site permit,” which entails reviewing the environmental and site-safety factors involved in using the property.
Should it actually decide it wants to go ahead with a project, Duke would have to go back to the NRC for construction and operating permits.
Legally speaking, the early site review process is optional, and it didn’t even exist when Duke built its existing fleet of reactors in the Carolinas, the newest of which went online in 1987.
The country’s first wave of reactor construction taught the NRC and the industry as a whole that “many of the challenges that delayed projects” come on the site-selection side, said Chris Nolan, Duke’s vice president for new nuclear projects.
Successfully navigating the early review would mean “we’ll have finality” on that, with a completed environmental impact statement and assessments of risks from such things as earthquakes and hurricanes, Nolan said.
“So we look at [the filing] as a non-regrettable decision to reduce regulatory risk and make progress while we continue to evaluate technologies,” he said.
Belews Creek is currently home to one of Duke’s coal-fired power plants. For a nuclear project, the utility is looking at land just to the east that it believes can accommodate up to six small modular reactors.
Design-wise, these are smaller units than the gigawatt-scale reactors Duke has built previously. Typically, each SMR can generate about 300 megawatts.
Duke’s long-range planning, currently under review by the N.C. Utilities Commission, presumes that the utility may add 600 megawatts of new nuclear capacity by 2037.
It would need only two SMRs to cover 600 megawatts, but as an early site permit is good for at least 20 years, Duke would have the ability to add more later.
“It gives us tremendous functionality and optionality,” Nolan said.
Duke and the NRC have been discussing the idea for nearly two years, with a series of meetings unfolding in 2024 and 2025. In July, Duke began giving NRC officials “draft portions of the application to review in an audit setting” and offer feedback, Nolan said.
In practice, that means they’ve already “seen the whole document,” and to date their feedback “has all been positive” in the sense that they think Duke is covering the necessary bases, Nolan said.
The early site process leaves open the choice of a specific type of reactor. On that front, Duke is considering six possibilities, including options from GE Vernova, Westinghouse, NuScale and TerraPower.
The GE Vernova design, the BWRX-300, factors in an active construction project in Canada. There, Ontario Power Generation intends to build four SMRs northeast of Toronto by the mid-2030s at an estimated cost of about $15.3 billion.
Work on the foundations of the new reactors is well underway, Ontario Power says.
The federal government is also subsidizing a Tennessee Valley Authority project near Knoxville.
Duke is participating in that effort. From it and the Canadian project, “we plan to learn a lot,” in keeping with its view that it’s best to be “a second mover,” Nolan said.
