Jun. 16--Perhaps, in retrospect, the day John Fees left Central Virginia and headed to Houston to take the reins of McDermott International will be one of the red-letter days in the region's business history.

Fees, you may remember, was the long-time president of B&W, the nuclear services company owned by McDermott. He took with him to Texas an in-depth knowledge of the skills, work ethic and abilities of the 2,500 people B&W employs in the region, and that's paying off in major ways for Lynchburg.

Last week at a news conference in Washington at the National Press Club, Fees and his top lieutenants announced the company was undertaking a brand-new nuclear initiative that would have a major presence in Lynchburg.

B&W mPower Reactor is the company's response to the nation's burgeoning need for energy.

Currently, there are just more than 100 commercial nuclear reactors at work in the United States. No new plant has been built since the 1970s, in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster.

Nuclear power plants are expensive to build, often taking years from conception through regulatory approval to the completion of the project. A traditional nuclear power plant produces major amounts of electricity, usually on the order of 1,600 megawatts or so. Big and costly, that about sums it up.

Well, the mPower Reactor (the "m" stands for "modular") turns that old concept on its head. It's small, modular and scalable, meaning companies can add power-generation capacity in increments of 125 megawatts at a time. As McDermott officials pointed out last week, those facts make the reactor especially attractive to power companies wanting to dip their toes in the nuclear waters but wary of the traditionally large costs.

According to Fees, the mPower Reactor project could mean hundreds of new jobs in Lynchburg and at B&W sites in Ohio and Indiana. And it's the size of the reactor that makes it a potential job-creator. Many of the components of the smaller reactor, unlike those for the larger traditional reactors, can be produced right here in America, creating jobs for American workers.

The size, too, also makes the mPower Reactor a potential game-changer in nuclear power circles, as the cost would likely be a fraction of larger, traditional-sized nuclear plants, greatly expanding the potential customer base.

Central Virginia is poised to ride the wave of commercial nuclear energy, for you see, right across town from McDermott's B&W is the North American headquarters for Areva, the French-owned nuclear services company.

Nuclear power is clean and safe, and it's getting more economical every day as the science advances. When the United States wises up to what the rest of the world already knows, Central Virginia will be reaping many of the benefits.

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