Webb gets nuclear schooling during Lynchburg visit

By Ray Reed

Published: August 21, 2008

Sen. Jim Webb toured an Areva facility in Lynchburg on Thursday and said he learned that it might be time to reconsider the nation’s moratorium on recycling nuclear fuel.

Webb, D-Va., said the company’s engineers explained that spent fuel, which is now stored in pools at power plants including two in Virginia, could be reused if the United States permitted the recycling process that is allowed in several European countries.

“I’m going to start looking into that,” Webb said in an interview after the tour, adding that he couldn’t be sure whether he will find that a change is feasible.

Webb’s two-day stay in the Lynchburg also included an “energy roundtable” at Central Virginia Community College on Thursday morning. He introduced Sen. Barack Obama at E.C. Glass High School on Wednesday evening at the candidate’s town hall meeting.

Webb said his U.S. Naval Academy studies, which gave him an engineering degree that he really didn’t want, led to his serving on nuclear-equipped vessels and gave him a familiarity with atomic matters that few lawmakers share.

Areva’s engineers told Webb on Thursday that a policy adopted during the Carter administration almost 30 years ago prohibits recycling spent fuel rods, whose uranium content is still mostly intact.

Babcock & Wilcox Co. and Areva are participants in a federally sponsored study that’s underway into the technology and methods now available for renewing the fuel.

In a related development, Areva signed an agreement this week at the University of Idaho concerning a process developed by a professor to extract usable uranium from old fuel rods.

Webb said he also learned that 96 percent of the uranium in spent rods could be reclaimed. The remaining 4 percent waste would require permanent storage, and the nation doesn’t have a site approved for that use.

At the CVCC event, college educators and nuclear-company executives told a crowd of about 65 people that Lynchburg is an energy center.

Del. Shannon Valentine, D-Lynchburg, who was moderator of the meeting, said the political and economic scene brought about by high gas prices, calls for more domestic oil production and expected demand for more electricity may be the nation’s top concern.

“The issue that will define us as a generation will be how we manage the energy crisis,” Valentine said.

Stan Shoun, vice president of workforce development at CVCC, said the college anticipated five years ago that many of today’s energy issues would occur, including a shortage of young people trained in energy technology.

The college launched programs to educate new engineers and develop trained technicians for nuclear-related fields, Shoun said.

“We were energy when it wasn’t cool,” Shoun said.

Besides Areva and B&W, which he called “the 800-pound gorillas” of Lynchburg’s energy sector, Shoun said the region has other companies that that need workers in related engineering fields, including Flowserve Inc. and Trax, along with Diamond Power Controls.

“Five or six years ago, we started looking at this problem, and companies with vision could see the perfect storm coming,” Shoun said.

The response included engineering-degree programs at the college, in partnership with the University of Virginia and Areva, Shoun said.

But the response also reached down to the middle-school level, sponsoring teams of youngsters who compete using robots built with Lego parts. The goal is to develop future employees for Areva, which uses robots in its manufacturing process.

“We started a robotics pipeline,” Shoun said, with a Lego robotics league that has 30 teams this year. It’s the largest robotics league in the world, he said.

Webb, responding to Shoun’s comments, said he wouldn’t call the situation a perfect storm.

“I’d call it the perfect marriage,” Webb said, referring to the partnership between the companies and the college.