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Duke Energy Corp. proposed installing a small nuclear reactor at a North Carolina power plant and ending the facility’s decades-long use of coal, part of a sweeping plan to supply the region’s growing electricity needs.
The Belews Creek Steam Station would house a small, modular reactor — designed to be faster to build and start up than the larger nuclear plants in use today — as part of a broader plan the utility giant submitted to North and South Carolina regulators Tuesday to increase electricity supply while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Duke, which operates 11 nuclear reactors at six plants across North and South Carolina, estimates that the two states will need an additional 35,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity generation within 15 years. That’s more than the annual output of all the power plants in Delaware, Maine and New Hampshire combined.
The Belews Creek reactor could be running by 2034, while the plant’s fossil-fuel units, which can burn coal or natural gas, would be retired. Duke also is looking for another location — likely another coal-fired plant — to host a second, similarly sized reactor and could add more reactors to each site later on, said spokesman Bill Norton.
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