Adticle from The News & Advance in Lynchburg, VA

Areva’s new design for a nuclear reactor that was sent to the federal government this week could lead to an expansion with new jobs in Lynchburg, said Tom Christopher, the company’s president of U.S. operations.

Approval for the expansion is awaited from Areva’s global headquarters in France, Christopher said, but he indicated up to 500 jobs could be added at Areva locations around the United States, with many of them in a new building at the company’s location on Old Forest Road.

“We are waiting for corporate approval to expand our facility,” Areva spokeswoman Susan Hess said.

Areva has not completed its plans, “including where our employees will be located throughout the United States,” Hess said. “We will need additional facilities in order to perform the detailed engineering work that will be required over the next several years.”

Up to 5 million hours of engineering work will be needed for Areva and a utility company to build a nuclear power plant under a design the company submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday, said Ray Ganthner, Areva’s vice president for new plant deployment.

That detailed task will require five times more work than Areva employees put into the design, which the company celebrated on Thursday with a party and a parade around the parking lot, led by the E.C. Glass High School band chanting “Areva! Areva! Areva!”

“The victory lap,” Ganthner called the parade, because Areva believes it has made up ground against competitors GE and Westinghouse/Toshiba in terms of next-generation reactor design. Westinghouse submitted a design to the NRC five years ago, and GE produced one three years ago.

“We have caught up,” Ganthner told about 200 employees. “Congratulations to all of you.”

He told them to get some rest during the holidays because “we’re going to continue on the detailed design, starting on
Jan. 2.”

Christopher drew cheers from the crowd by saying Areva hopes to break ground for construction of the first reactor next fall at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. If the NRC’s early review of the design goes well, grading on the proposed site can begin while the agency’s close scrutiny is still being completed, Christopher said.

“It would be the first time in 30 years ground has been broken for a nuclear reactor in the United States,” he said.

Areva is optimistic about a speedy NRC review of its design for three reasons, Ganthner and Christopher said.

First, the U.S. Energy Act in 2005 combined a new reactor’s design and operating license into a single process, speeding up the approvals by as much as 10 years, Christopher said. “It’s a one-stop licensing procedure,” he said.

Second, Ganthner said, the design is an evolutionary one, combining for the first time many features that have worked at other Areva reactors around the world. That track record should lead the NRC to raise only a few design questions, Ganthner said.

Third, reactors with almost the same design that was submitted to the NRC already are under construction in France and Finland, and lessons learned in the slow-going Finland project have been incorporated into the design, Ganthner said.

The reactor is called, in the U.S., an evolutionary pressurized water reactor, or EPR. The same acronym is used in Europe, although that version puts power on the grid with a 50-hertz cycle instead of the 60-hertz needed in the United States.

If the NRC gives an OK after its initial review, which is expected to be complete by late February, Areva’s design would undergo about two years of closer scrutiny. The hoped-for result would be design certification by the NRC, which could mean similar reactors could be built at other locations.

Areva’s target site for its first new reactor is at Calvert Cliffs, on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

Areva and Constellation Energy, which operates two existing reactors at Calvert Cliffs, have formed a joint-venture company called UniStar Nuclear to build a reactor there.

Christopher said Areva also hopes to build at least two more reactors - one with Constellation at Nine Mile Point near Oswego, N.Y., and another at a plant in Callaway County, Mo., operated by AmerenUE.