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When Timmons Group’s Joe Hines penned “No Power, No Project” in the July 2024 issue of Site Selection proposing hyperscale data center operators pony up the cash for small modular nuclear plants, a flurry of projects in that exact sphere of activity began to make headlines of their own. Among the latest are collaborations to construct and design a potential small modular nuclear reactor at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Clinch River Nuclear Site in Tennessee. An integrated project delivery model is being pursued, similar to what TVA’s technology partner Ontario Power Generation is deploying for an SMR at its Darlington site in Ontario, Canada, a TVA release explained in January. A separate release from GE Vernova (which operates GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy based in Wilmington, North Carolina) said a TVA-led coalition seeking $800 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Generation III+ SMR program “includes Bechtel, BWX Technologies (BWXT), Duke Energy, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), GEH, Indiana Michigan Power – an AEP company, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Sargent & Lundy, Scot Forge, other utilities and advanced nuclear project developers and the State of Tennessee.”
Later in January, GE Vernova announced plans to invest more than $50 million in nuclear fuel operations at GE Hitachi’s Wilmington site as part of $600 million of investments across its U.S. factories and facilities over the next two years that are expected to create 1,500 jobs. Those are the first part of “a larger $9 billion cumulative global capex and R&D investment plan over the next three years announced by the company in December,” GE Vernova said.
In February, TVA confirmed that, pending required approvals and completion of applicable legal reviews and processes, its current planning assumption includes “building about 5,500 megawatts of new firm, dispatchable generation by 2029 and adding up to 10,000 megawatts of solar by 2035. “Construction is underway at Shawnee, Cumberland, Johnsonville, and Kingston Energy Complex, and TVA has completed 1,400 megawatts of new gas units at Paradise in Kentucky and Colbert in Alabama,” TVA said. In addition to building 95 miles of transmission line and fiber, TVA crews also “four new delivery points for customer expansion and load growth, including new substations in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and Artesia, Mississippi.”
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