WASHINGTON (WV News) — Officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently assured Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., that they will provide assistance and support to West Virginia as it works to develop nuclear power generation in the state.

During her weekly press briefing Thursday, Capito discussed a recent hearing with NRC officials.

In 2022, the West Virginia Legislature passed Senate Bill 4, which repealed a pair of bills passed in 1996 that established the state’s ban on nuclear power plants.

“I am very interested, and the state of West Virginia is very interested, in expanding nuclear availability for power generation,” said Capito, who serves as the ranking Republican member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “It’s clean, and there’s all kinds of innovations that have made it much, much safer and a much smaller footprint. There are small modular units, and there’s advanced nuclear units.”

The NRC, the independent agency that oversees matters related to nuclear energy, is still in the process of figuring out how to license and regulate the new generation of nuclear technology, Capito said.

“We want to make sure that they get licensed in a timely manner,” she said. “One of things that I think West Virginia is looking at ... is to try and repurpose some abandoned power generation sites.”

Locations like former coal mines or shuttered coal-fired electricity generation facilities would make ideal candidates, Capito said.

“We have these sites that already have the transmission (infrastructure),” she said. “It seems tailor-made to bring in a small modular nuclear after all the considerations.”

West Virginia recently began the process of submitting the necessary paperwork to join the NRC’s Agreement State Program, which would give the Mountain State the authority to license and regulate byproduct materials, source materials and certain quantities of special nuclear materials.

Currently, 39 states are members of the Agreement State Program, and “Connecticut is currently pursuing an agreement with the NRC,” according to the agency.

“West Virginia and another state are preparing the paperwork so they can become a state that sort of self-governs in this area under the auspice of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Capito said.

During the hearing with NRC officials earlier this week, they pledged to review the state’s application and to provide “expertise from them to make sure that we’re well equipped to be able to handle that,” Capito said.

“They remarked that they were very proud of West Virginia’s efforts in this particular regard,” she added.

According to information from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal-fired power plants accounted for 91% of West Virginia’s total electricity net generation in 2021. Renewable energy resources — primarily hydroelectric power and wind energy — contributed 5%, and natural gas provided more than 4%.

That was an increase over the previous year. In 2020, coal-fired power plants accounted for 88% of West Virginia’s electricity.