West Virginia’s NLIC proposal revealed through FOIA request

The details of West Virginia's request to be considered for the Department of Energy's Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses (NLIC) program were made public recently, in a September 25 article in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

In a surprise move, the DOE added West Virginia to the list of possible NLIC host states with a memorandum of understanding signed on September 2, over a month after it unveiled the five states initially selected as candidates for the initiative. However, when that MOU was announced September 8, neither the DOE nor West Virginia officials made public the text of the state's response to the DOE's request for information-essentially, the state's application for the program.

Staff at the Gazette-Mail filed a request for documents related to the state's proposal under the West Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on September 8. The publication received the documents on September 16 and published its assessment just over a week later in an article that drew pushback from West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey for what he described as a misrepresentation of the proposal's contents. Nuclear News has viewed the proposal, which the Gazette-Mail has since shared with the public.

West Virginia's proposal: West Virginia's selection as an NLIC contender was unexpected not only because it arrived weeks after the other candidates were announced but also because the state's energy sector has long been dependent primarily on coal. As the West Virginia Office of Energy notes on its website, nine of its 10 largest power plants are fueled by coal, and the state is one of six states east of the Mississippi River (and one of 22 in the country, as noted in a previous Nuclear News Daily "Trivia Tuesday") without a nuclear power plant.

The state took steps toward a nuclear future in 2022, when its legislature passed a bill to repeal its moratorium on nuclear energy initiatives; it followed in 2024 with legislation designed to support the deployment of small modular reactors for what the NLIC proposal calls "information technology industry" projects. The proposal builds on that legislation as well as the state's history as a center for heavy industry, noting that the chemical manufacturing, metal manufacturing, and glass production projects it has hosted all provide a foundation for the infrastructure that an NLIC site would require.

The state's proposed NLIC plan lists six key functions that a West Virginia campus could provide:

A consolidated interim storage facility (CISF).

Research for final disposition/long-term storage boreholes and engineered caverns.

Advanced reactor deployment.

Research into nuclear fuel recycling.

Consideration for front-end operations such as fuel enrichment and fabrication.

Manufacturing opportunities.

Of note is the proposal's identification of a CISF as a top priority. The text describes the temporary storage of spent fuel as a "near-term actionable strategic opportunity" that would allow West Virginia to supply nearby states with a valuable resource and position itself as a technology hub for locations where nuclear reactors are currently operating.

The proposal also broaches the issue of long-term storage of some of the nation's spent fuel, which the DOE has declared must be an essential component of a state's NLIC plan. West Virginia's plan notes that, although the Nuclear Waste Policy Act would need to be updated or new federal policy otherwise would need to be enacted to establish a deep geologic repository at a site other than Yucca Mountain, retired mines throughout the state could be repurposed for storage if federal policy allows. Additionally, a 2017 study determined that shale reserves in West Virginia could provide adequate storage for natural gas, which potentially makes them useful for deep borehole disposal of spent nuclear fuel as well. In its NLIC proposal, the state expresses openness toward researching long-term storage options on its campus, though it maintains that interim storage is its priority.

Disputing the depiction: After the Charleston Gazette-Mail published its September 25 article, Morrisey replied by saying the publication "got it wrong."

In a post on social media platform X on September 27, the governor stated that his priority in applying for the NLIC program was to bring efforts in nuclear manufacturing and power generation to the state-not to position West Virginia as a site for nuclear waste disposal facilities-saying, "More energy jobs and manufacturing jobs are on the table. Nuclear waste dumps are not."

The Gazette-Mail published a follow-up article on September 29, this time responding to Morrisey's claim. The newspaper stood by its reporting and declared that it would share the documents it received through its FOIA request to allow readers to make their own assessments of the proposal.

As of this writing, the Gazette-Mail has made the documents available on the Document Cloud platform.