West Virginia officials should work to ensure there are build-ready sites for the construction of small modular nuclear reactors in the state, said U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., on Thursday.

The state, with its numerous brownfield sites and shuttered coal-fired power plants, is ideally primed to benefit from the expansion of nuclear power generation, Capito said during her weekly media briefing.

“I think the state needs to make sure we’re site-ready,” she said.

The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act passed the U.S. Senate Tuesday as part of the Fire Grants and Safety Act and now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature.

Largely through changes to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the legislation is aimed at promoting the licensing and expansion of small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, Capito said.

SMRs are an emerging type of nuclear reactors that have about one-third the power-generating capacity of traditional reactors, according to information from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“They’re smaller. They’re not the nuclear reactor of old,” Capito said. “They’re safer, and they’re also very green.”

West Virginia has already taken an initial step toward nuclear energy generation. In 2022, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 4, which repealed a pair of bills passed in the late ‘90s that prohibited nuclear plants in the state.

The ADVANCE Act includes incentives for developing SMR projects on sites impacted by coal mining and sites of former coal-powered facilities, Capito said.

“I think it suits perfectly for West Virginia, because they are big employers — nuclear plants are traditionally big employers,” she said.

The construction phase of these reactors usually lasts several years and requires “thousands” of workers, Capito said.

“You might do site preparation and then building the reactors and then other facilities that need to be associated with a small modular nuclear footprint,” she said.

Nuclear facilitates tend to need more permanent employees compared to facilities that run on fossil fuels, Capito said.

“It would depend on how many reactors you have, but I think it would be significant, and they would be well-paid jobs too,” she said. “You have to have a lot of onsite (personnel) because there is a lot of safety arenas and concerns.”

Capito said she sees nuclear generation becoming an important component of the nation’s energy portfolio in the years ahead.

“There are predictions that we’re going to have desires for twice the amount of energy that we have right now. That could be because of electrical vehicles or AI or data centers and a whole host of other things,” she said. “Nuclear power, I think, holds great promise. It’s hand-in-hand with the all-of-the-above energy plan that I’ve always talked about.”

There is only one facility with SMRs that is currently operating, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov began commercial operation in May 2020. It produces energy from two 35-megawatt SMRs.

Ground was broken on the first American SMR project on June 10, according to the American Nuclear Society.

TerraPower, an energy company founded by Bill Gates, has a planned SMR project utilizing a Natrium reactor adjacent to an operating coal-fired facility in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The reactor will use liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water.

The project is awaiting final review from NRC but has been cleared to proceed with “nonnuclear construction.”