A World First in Chesterfield County: Nuclear Fusion

Rich Meagher:

Welcome to RVAs. Got Issues, the show that brings you the people and ideas that are reshaping Greater Richmond. I’m your host, rich Meagher. Nuclear Fusion is coming to Chesterfield County. This is a big deal if it’s really happening. This is an unproven technology, but it’s one that promises to provide energy at a scale we haven’t yet seen. Still. Virginia’s energy needs are growing exponentially, and we’re gonna need every kilowatt we can get if we don’t want our energy bills to grow with it. Luckily for us in RVA, we have an expert coming to us from the center of the universe, the town of Ashland, in Hanover County. Returning to the podcast is Adam Sledd, the executive director of the Dominion Energy Innovation Center. Adam, welcome back.

Adam Sledd:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Rich Meagher:

So, Adam, we had this big announcement from the governor a few months ago. A power plant’s gonna be built in Chesterfield County that uses cutting edge technology, nuclear fusion. Yeah. This sounds like science fiction to me. I have lots of questions. Can you tell us, first of all, what’s actually gonna come to Chesterfield? Are we seeing big cooling towers?

Adam Sledd:

So let me start by saying, what I’m going to say is coming from the Dominion Energy Innovation Center standpoint, being the 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit. Right? So I’m not a Dominion Energy employee, right? I don’t work for the state. So I have sort of my version and understanding of how this technology’s coming together. So let me start with some fusion context.

Rich Meagher:

Okay? Yeah. ’cause we’ve been hearing about fusion for a long time. Like what is that?

Adam Sledd:

So the joke about fusion is that it’s always 20 years away, no matter when you start. But fusion is different from fission in the very key regard, right? Nuclear fission. When we think about nuclear plants now with like uranium fuel and radioactive waste,

Rich Meagher:

The big cooling towers,

Adam Sledd:

The big cooling towers, uh, that’s because a fission reaction is basically about splitting atoms. So that’s why it sort of creates all this other waste fusion is actually taking atoms and smashing them together. Fusing them. Fusing them as it as it were. And that’s the same reaction that happens on the sun. That’s how stars work. Why fusion matters is if you get it right, you don’t have the same radioactive waste that you have with a fission reaction. The fuel that you use is very readily available and doesn’t have anywhere sort of near the radioactive half-life. And then also the power that you generate in theory when we get there, is way beyond what we currently generate from any other type of energy use. The key kind of equation in fusion is Q equals one, which means essentially at q equals one, the amount of energy you’re using to create the reaction is equal to the amount of energy that you’re getting out of the reaction. And we finally, at least in the demonstration level Yeah. Are there. So now what you’re looking to do is get to above Q equals one, get to Q equals two, Q equals three.

Rich Meagher:

So you’re generating more energy than you’re using to actually create the process.

Adam Sledd:

Yeah. Right? And that’s, that’s sort of like the nut.

Rich Meagher:

So should we be worried about safety then? Right? I mean, obviously there’s these high profile like Chernobyl, things like that. Right? So,

Adam Sledd:

So this is the promise of fusion. The promise of fusion is there’s vastly reduced safety concerns. The way the federal regulatory system is approaching it is that it’s just way, way easier to regulate than a fission reactor. What you wind up with fusion is a very different type of reactor. And we can go into reactor designs if you want. <laugh>, we can talk about toka max and magnets and high temperature superconductors. But it’s, it’s a, it’s a different type of animal. And I think you’d have less of the sort of like classic nuclear reactor that we think of from like the Simpsons.

Rich Meagher:

Right? So we will save that for our sister podcast RVA a’s got engineering issues.

Adam Sledd:

Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

Right? So, um, we’ve been hearing about this kind of stuff for decades, right? So it sounds like fusion energy is a different process. It’s cleaner. Yep. It’s easier to get materials. It’s probably safer and it generates way more energy. Why is this so hard to do? Why haven’t we had it yet?

Adam Sledd:

Okay, so basically the hard part is that you’re replicating how the sun works. And so, you know, to keep that as simple as possible, you have to create a container for the fusion energy that’s released that we’re talking like millions of degrees. So the hard part of fusion, what’s kept it from functioning so far is we didn’t have the right way to fuse those atoms. And then we didn’t have the container to hold the reaction and draw the power out of it. Billions and billions of dollars have gone into fusion startups and fusion research, and we’re starting to make the breakthroughs that need to get made in order to finally make this a reality

Rich Meagher:

In, in Chesterfield County,

Adam Sledd:

Right. In Chesterfield County

Rich Meagher:

in a building that looks like a building, like a warehouse or something. Yeah. And that they’ve got this container and this energy going on there. So Commonwealth is the name of the company, ironically, right? I guess you’re in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Adam Sledd:

Well fits, doesn’t it?

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. And so that’s the company that has been announced that’s gonna come to Chesterfield County. Is this a real company? Like they seem like they’re, they’re doing some promising stuff.

Adam Sledd:

The Fusion Industry Association tracks about 45 companies. The Commonwealth technology spun out of MIT 20 16 20 18. They’re basically the best funded of all of these companies. They’re the one that the most people have bet on their plan for building basically a giant magnetic shell to capture the reaction is sort of generally regarded as maybe the furthest along.

Rich Meagher:

And so when will we know that this path is actually getting the Q above one, right. That’s actually generating the energy the way that we want it to.

Adam Sledd:

So they’re building their prototype right now that they call Spark. Spark is the prototype arc is the first big reactor. That’s what would go in Chesterfield. So their plan is to be developing ARC at the same time that they’re perfecting Spark. So Spark will prove that the thing can work and then ARC will do it at commercial scale. And to be clear, I mean even if this goes according to their timeline, we’re talking about eight to 10 years

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Adam Sledd:

Before it’d be up and running.

Rich Meagher:

So why here, why in Chesterfield, why in Virginia, I mean obviously Glenn Youngkin seems very interested in nuclear power, but why is he so interested in increasing our, our power?

Adam Sledd:

Why we’re interested is really simply, Virginia has the largest electric load growth of any state in the country. Both are measured and are projected electric load growth outpaces every other state.

Rich Meagher:

And that just means how much power we’re gonna need to power all the businesses and companies and houses and people

Adam Sledd:

Yep.

Rich Meagher:

That are flipping light switches and plugging in their phone to charge.

Adam Sledd:

Yep. Exactly. Exactly. How much energy we’re using as a state is going up and up and up at an almost unprecedented rate.

Rich Meagher:

But that’s not because I’m plugging in my phone an extra hour at night. Right. What’s driving that?

Adam Sledd:

The answer is data centers. The answer is the AI arms race

News Archival:

According to the US Department of Energy, a typical data center consumes 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of an average office building. Data centers want to build. Now they’re in a competition to build out to meet this AI desire. So they’re in a race to build out as fast as they can.

Adam Sledd:

It went from not being a big thing to being front and center. Holy cow, this is the only thing that matters. And if we don’t get it right, we’re gonna lose out economically.

News Archival:

Data centers alone support 74,000 jobs bringing in over $9 billion in Virginia, GDP, and generate billions of dollars of local revenue supporting education, public safety, and critical local services. We should continue to be the data center capital of the world.

Rich Meagher:

But that means that there, the pause of this increase in low growth that you’re saying, right? If we were just building houses, it was just normal companies coming to Virginia, then, you know, certainly our needs would increase, but they wouldn’t be increasing exponentially.

Adam Sledd:

So like the average growth, like annual growth and electricity requirements say in the state for most of our lifetimes has been like 0.3% a year.

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Adam Sledd:

What we’re looking at right now is like five, six, 7% a year. And that number hasn’t been seen in like generations.

Rich Meagher:

All right. So data centers are driving this push towards fusion, other kinds of energy too. And we need it now because these data centers are here. Why are they here? Why are data centers big in Virginia? Why are we the global center of of data?

Adam Sledd:

A couple reasons. The first reason was we are the home of a lot of the federal government. We are the home of a lot of the defense department. Right. When the internet was born as a DARPA project, right, right, right. A defense research project. Where did it get started? In Virginia.

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Adam Sledd:

And so when they were initially building all of the cables, all of the fiber to carry information around that would become the backbone of the internet. Where did it go? Northern Virginia.

And so one of the things that matters still today from a server perspective, from a data center perspective, is latency. How long it takes to get information from one place to another. So to this day, a big part of data center site selection is, well, where’s the biggest cable? Where’s the best fiber I can get? Right? And the answer is Virginia. And it becomes this perfect storm of like the economic development folks in Northern Virginia are all used to data centers. They’re used to working with the site selection people. They’re used to making these deals happen. The real estate companies are used to going out and finding land. They’re used to working with Dominion. Dominion Energy is recognized as one of the world’s leading utilities in terms of how do you work with data centers. And so all of this stuff just kind of came together and it slowly developed here. It’s one of those things where it developed slowly and slowly and slowly and then suddenly.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. So how does this go from being a Northern Virginia phenomenon to now bothering us down here in central Virginia? Really?

Adam Sledd:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

Across the whole, the whole commonwealth,

Adam Sledd:

Part of the answer is land cost. So Northern Virginia land was cheap until it wasn’t.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. Try to build a house up in Arlington now,

Adam Sledd:

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

And so same thing for data centers, right? Same thing. Try to build it there.

Adam Sledd:

The land is cheap and it makes your business model work until one day it doesn’t. And then you go looking a little bit further out and then you go a little bit further out and suddenly the next thing you know, they’re not just building the data center in Loudoun County, they’re building the data center in New Kent.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah.

Adam Sledd:

Right. Eastern Henrico, Southern Chesterfield, Hanover.

Rich Meagher:

And this is what leads to conflicts with our… exactly… like local communities, right? Because these developments are growing, they’re getting bigger too. And local communities are getting mad about the building, the noise of these things like big fans and cooling and water use. But really the big problem is energy, right? We just need energy for the data centers, which brings us back to the nuclear fusion plant in Chesterfield County. Right? Is that gonna solve the problem, right? Is that the magic bullet? We now create this fusion center and now it’s infinite uh, energy for the rest of Virginia.

Adam Sledd:

So 10, 15 years ago, a data center in Northern Virginia would use like what we would call, like their sort of nameplate capacity would be like say 15 to 20 megawatts, 10 megawatts to 15. The announcements you’re seeing now are people taking down like 500 to a thousand acres and planning for a gigawatt of power. And that is more than a nuclear reactor. Wow.

That is like huge, huge, huge amounts of power. So when we say commonwealth’s arc reactor in Chesterfield would do 400 megawatts in and of itself, that’s an impressive amount of power to generate. But it’s only going to be about half of one of these sort of like new mega site, uh, AI model training hyperscale or data centers. So the dream of the future then is we have a bunch of sparkly new fusion reactors that work, that are giving us sort of very low fuel, unlimited clean power here, meeting our Clean Economy Act goals, but also growing our economy.

Rich Meagher:

Well let’s roll that back a second. Right? So a big data center comes to anywhere in the state. Yeah. Right? And Dominion has to serve that data center by law,

Adam Sledd:

Right? Yes.

Rich Meagher:

Right. They’re supposed to provide enough energy for all the businesses and homes in Virginia that they’re responsible for. Right? Right. So you gotta build more infrastructure for that, right? Yeah. And more power plants, more turbines, more lines, yeah. And maybe more of these fusion nuclear plants. So how does that not make my rates go up? Isn’t it definitely gonna make my rates go up?

Adam Sledd:

This is the concern with the amount of infrastructure that’s going to have to get built. There is a real risk that we’re going to be adding 10, 20, $30 a month to people’s bills if we’re not careful about creating essentially a new class of electric bill for data center customers that allows them to pay more directly for the infrastructure they’re going to use while leaving it off of the bill of your everyday customer.

Rich Meagher:

And so you combine that with the requirement, as you said, like the clean economy act, right? The state laws are requiring dominion to move away from fossil fuels. Yes. And towards more of these renewables. So it seems like there’s pressure to build all this stuff, but there’s a question about who’s gonna end up paying for it. Is it the data centers?

Adam Sledd:

Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

And the big companies, or is it John Q taxpayer? Right. You and I on our utility bills.

Adam Sledd:

And I would say it’s an open question. I would say everybody sort of working in this space has a lot of thoughts about what answers might look like. But there is not yet a consensus reached between the state’s utilities, the state government, the legislature, and the data center companies themselves.

Rich Meagher:

We’ll hear more from Adam Sled about Virginia’s energy needs, including how our state leaders are helping or not. When we come back on RVAs Got Issues, this is RVAs got issues. We’re talking with energy expert Adam Sled. So Adam, essentially what you’re saying here is, so we’ve got data centers coming, we’ve got a need for more power. We maybe can’t necessarily provide it all right Now it’s almost like dominion and government and the the data center builders are, are kind of negotiating where they’re gonna get their power from. Oh yeah. On a case by case basis.

Adam Sledd:

Yeah. So it’s become this kind of puzzle. So when you talk to, when you talk to the data center developers, the most sophisticated ones are the most sophisticated at putting together all of those puzzle pieces and saying, we’re gonna get a battery from here and a natural gas turbine from here and some solar. And they’re basically putting this puzzle piece together and then kind of building their own mini utility system to power all of these computers. That’s where we’re at. It’s an okay solution. The downside relative to Virginia Clean Economy Act is we are probably gonna wind up with a lot of natural gas that was not intended by the Clean Economy Act.

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Adam Sledd:

So depending on who you ask, it’s totally cool. Um, and other people will tell you it is gonna create a, a huge problem.

Rich Meagher:

Right? And so it’s this kind of like patchwork solution we’re putting together now, but it seems like we need to figure out who’s gonna pay for all this infrastructure, how it’s gonna work and, and how we’re gonna solve these big energy needs. So yeah. Who’s on that? Is the state legislature supposed to be doing something about this and are they doing something about it?

Adam Sledd:

So they’re still mostly in study mode.

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Adam Sledd:

A lot of bills were considered in this past legislative session. Just a ton of bills. And most of the stuff that made its way through is sort of on the margins, right? It’s more around land use and noise reductions, you know? So there was a storage bill passed that asked Dominion to greatly increase the amount of energy storage batteries that they plan to install over the next 20 years.

Rich Meagher:

So that if we generate energy, we can keep it someplace and use it later when we really need it.

Adam Sledd:

Yeah, exactly. And like that will help this problem sort of at the margins over the next couple years and then later in the future again. So you’re kind of pushing things down the road. A lot of this is directing our public utility commission to kind of like come up with answers.

Rich Meagher:

So just to sum up right, we need more and more energy. Dominion has to both supply this energy and convert to renewables. And the state legislature is kind of in wait and see mode.

Adam Sledd:

There is not necessarily a fully clear, fully baked plan to address it.

Rich Meagher:

So something might say that’s kind of rolling the dice that we’re waiting a little bit or that we haven’t developed this plan yet. What would you say about that?

Adam Sledd:

I would say that nobody, there’s no one else we can look to. This is kinda the problem with being the leader, right? We’re looking around going, oh, well who else has the model that we should be pulling from? And the answer is, well, we’re number one so everyone else is already looking to us. And so that’s one of the trickier things, right? There isn’t necessarily another place for them to find an answer from. But otherwise, I hope that a year from now when we’re talking about the legislative session, that maybe something more concrete has come out of it that gives not just dominion, but the other state utilities, more flexibility to meet short-term demand loads while not sacrificing our future goals. Right? I mean that’s, that’s really the crux here.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon move at their own speed and they are not used to slowing down for state regulations. And our utilities move at the speed of state regulations. And so there’s this very clear frustration on the part of the large tech companies and the smaller tech companies that they want the state and the utility to be super flexible. And the state and the utilities have sort of pushed back and said, there’s a reason we’re not flexible. And I think the two are just gonna have to, you know, like anything else, they’re gonna have to compromise somehow. When I open up like biz sense and there’s another announcement about a thousand acres in Eastern Henrico being taken down for a data center that’s gonna need 900 megawatts of power. My first question is, uh, okay, how real is this?

Rich Meagher:

Right?

Adam Sledd:

Like, oh, all these people have business ideas, but there’s this sort of time lapse, right? That where the business idea has to come to reality and it’s, it’s a little hard right now to pull apart how exactly this is gonna play out in terms of, uh, load increase.

Rich Meagher:

Adam Sledd is the executive director at the Dominion Energy Innovation Center. Thanks again, Adam.

Adam Sledd:

Thank you so much.

Rich Meagher:

The James River Park system is a crown jewel in RVA a sprawling 600 acre hunk of nature along the river. But the lands along the river banks are threatened by invasive species that can harm native plants and maybe even our health. So what do we do about it? We recently went out to pony pasture to shine our community spotlight on a park expert and get this a local goat herder to find out.

Gera Williams:

My name is Gera Williams. I’m one of the invasive species specialists with James River Park System. An invasive species is a living organism that is non-native to the region that it’s found in and it’s causing damage. They can be spread on purpose or on accident. A lot of these plants would’ve been brought here because they’re considered beneficial in their native region. And then we end up with unintended consequences. They don’t have natural competitors in the area where they’re introduced. So they grow kind of unchecked and they can outcompete the native plants that are here. They could also be introduced on accident. Um, a lot of us, when we walk into a park with either our shoes or we’re riding mountain bikes or we’ve got a dog with us, there could be seeds in our shoes on a dogs fur. And as you step off the trail, or if our dogs step off the trail or run around, um, they can be spreading those invasive seeds.

Kristi Orcutt:

My clients will ask me, did you starve them before you brought them over? And I assure you I didn’t. I fed them all the way over here and yet there’s a new buffet in front of them and they’re just gonna gorge themselves. I’m Christy Orcutt. I’m the owner of RVA goats, LLC, and they invite our sheep and goats here every year to accompany all the other experts here that do native plant walks and invasive plant walks and Id talks and things like that. And, um, we pick a spot that’s small in near the parking lot that’s covered with invasives and just set the animals loose and let ’em just eat, eat, eat For the whole four hours that we’re here right now. We’ve got sheep and goats. The sheep eat with their heads down typically. So they’ll eat ground cover plants and the goats typically like to be up on their hind legs reaching for tall brush and vines.

So that’s why I bring them both. ’cause a lot of our trees are impacted by vines. If you ever see a tree that looks like a stalk of broccoli, it’s probably severely impacted by English ivy fighting for a breath. And so the goats will reach up as high as they can, usually seven feet off the ground and eat all of the leaves all the way around. And then they’ll use their teeth and their horns to strip the bark off the vines. And then that makes it so much easier for a volunteer to follow up and just cut those vines and, and free the top of the tree from that stranglehold.

This area, it looks pretty tame, but there’s a lot of branches. I couldn’t necessarily get a mower in here if this were steep a slope going down to the river. We definitely couldn’t use machines. So basically the goats and sheep go where people fear to tread. They’re four footed. They’ve got clove and hoof, so they’re really grippy traction and they’re able to get up and, and down hillsides just so easily. I have probably now about 130 and most of them are rescues from people who had to forfeit their animals for one reason or another. And so we give them a safe harbor and a good working life. We hope. And we stay constantly busy from March through Thanksgiving. We have the whole eastern half of the state from DC all the way to Chesapeake. But we try to focus in, in Richmond. This is our hometown. We’re trying to inspire other people to take this on and, um, start their own small goat grazing businesses. ’cause there are hundreds of landscaping businesses in Richmond with mowers and sprayers and things like that. And we’re the only game in town here. I don’t hear mowers, I don’t hear blowers, I don’t hear loud machinery. So it’s a very calming thing. And sheep and goats have been utilized to keep pastures and hillsides clear for millennia since the beginning of human civilization.

Gera Williams:

What we’re trying to do is raise awareness of invasive species. So a lot of people, um, are out in the park and they see all the green out here, and they just assume everything that’s growing must be beneficial. I, so we just really want people to start to understand what a healthy environment and ecosystem looks like compared to what we need to work on. Other folks say, well just let nature take its course. And it’s important to remember that humans are now a part of these ecosystems and we have a responsibility as stewards of the land, um, to step in when things are out of balance, um, and try to create positive change.

Rich Meagher:

Gera Williams is an invasive species specialist with the James River Park System. Kristy Orcutt is the owner of RVA Goats. You can find out more about invasive species and the James River Park system at jamesriverpark.org. That’s our show. Thanks to our guests, Adam Sledd, Gera Williams and Kristy Orcutt. Next up we wanna hear from you. We’re talking with experts about how changes in federal policy are affecting immigrants and refugees here in RVA. If you’ve got a question about immigration, call our listener voicemail line and leave a message at 8 0 4 5 6 0 8 1 0 8. That’s 8 0 4 5 6 0 8 1 0 8. You can also visit our website, RVAs got issues.vpm.org. RVAs Got Issues is produced by Max Wasserman and Rachel Dwyer. Donna Lack is our script editor. Audio mix by Steve Lack. Our intern is Cate McKenzie. Our theme music was composed by Alexander Hitchens. Meg Lindholm is our executive producer. Steve Humble is VP’s Chief Content Officer. I’m your host, rich Meagher. Thanks for listening.