Home Care In Belews Creek, NC

STOKES COUNTY, N.C. —

In 2015, Duke Energy pleaded guilty to federal environmental crimes after an investigation found the company’s coal ash dumps were leaking into water supplies. Fast forward almost eight years later, and WXII is seeing how the company says it is preventing that from happening again.

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Duke Energy has started the process of placing the first excavated coal ash into a new landfill, but it’s a process that could take another decade to complete. Duke Energy’s coal ash landfill on Belews Creek is now operational after years of construction. It's a process that includes input from the Department of Environmental Quality and environmental groups.

There’ll be four landfills located at Belews Creek, on property shared with the Belews Creek Steam Station. Duke Energy says the landfills will be the final resting place of almost five decades worth of excavated ash.

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"It's a multi-layer liner system with a leak detection system underneath it to ensure that there are no issues," said Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton. "The Department of Environmental Quality so far has just given us the permit to operate what's called cell two. That was the first one completed. There'll be four at the end of the day that will store all 12 million tons of coal ash."

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Nearly a decade ago, Duke Energy pleaded guilty to federal environmental crimes for allowing coal ash dumps to leak into the Dan River. The company says the landfill's construction will prevent ash from seeping into the area’s groundwater, which will be continuously monitored. Environmental groups, communities surrounding the property, and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality agreed on this new process.

"One of our existing line landfills is covered with grass, and it just looks like a grassy mound," said Norton. "That's what's gonna be here at the end. We're gonna monitor it for decades, but from a neighbor's perspective, they won't even see it."

Duke Energy also says it’s looking into changing how the Belews Creek Steam Station powers surrounding Stokes County. It plans to transition away from coal to other sources of energy.

"We're looking at a combination of advanced nuclear, hydrogen-capable natural gas storage, so it could be a combination of those," said Norton. "We already have infrastructure here. We have the transmission system here. We have well-trained workers here. So it makes all the sense in the world to replace this plant with something else right here in Stokes County."

Duke Energy expects to announce its plan for a transition to a different energy source later this year.

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The Belews Creek Steam Station is set to retire in 2035. Duke Energy is planning its replacement now to ensure the new technology is online by 2034.

BELEWS CREEK, N.C. — In 1974 the Belews Creek Steam Station became the largest coal-powered energy plant in North Carolina.

With a renewed focus on reducing carbon emissions, Duke Energy is now turning to nuclear technology.

"It's the backbone of the energy that we provide. In fact, it already provides more than 80% of all carbon free energy supply to the Carolina's," said Duke Energy Spokesperson, Bill Norton.

The new advanced nuclear technology will be the first of it's kind in the Carolinas.

"It is much more efficient, uses less land, and that's really why Belews Creek was the ideal site for this. It had sufficient land, it had water supply, it has the infrastructure already in place," said Norton.

Norton says other energy sources could be used on the site, in addition to the proposed nuclear technology.

Solar and battery storage could be used as well but are not strong enough, on their own, to generate the energy needed for the number of homes powered by the Belews Creek Steam Station.

"Nuclear energy is in one word the most cleanest energy human beings have ever invented," said Dr. Ashot Gasparian, Chair of the Department of Physics at North Carolina A&T.

He says one concern many have is the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors.

Dr. Gasparian says that there are ways to reduce or eliminate the dangers, allowing the waste to be disposed of safely or recycled.

"Radioactive secondary elements, we can bombard them with some beams to make them not radioactive, and we can store them any place," said Dr. Dr. Gasparian.

The nuclear technology is only a proposal at this point.

Duke Energy will still need the approval by state and federal regulators before work can begin.

"It's a decade long process, nothing is set in stone, we have a lot of steps to take to make sure that this is done right," said Norton.

Other work is currently underway at the Belews Creek site.

Crews are moving tons of coal ash into a new lined landfill which will help to protect the water supply in the area.

Duke Energy’s latest carbon-reduction plan calls for placing a modular “advanced nuclear” reactor on the site of the Belews Creek Steam Station, a partially coal-fired power plant that’s slated for retirement.

The proposal comes because the site has the land, infrastructure and workforce that Duke needs, and because Stokes County and the surrounding community “is reliant on [the] tax base” associated with the Belews Creek facility, Duke spokesman Bill Norton says.

“The current coal- and gas-fired plant is 17% of the Stokes County tax base, so the local community is very interested in replacement generation,” Norton says. “You combine all those factors, and it made for a very good match.”

Duke also reckons placing a reactor at “one other plant location to be determined” as it looks to retire its remaining coal plants, it said in announcing the filing of its latest proposed Carbon Plan Integrated Resource Plan.

The plan covers Duke’s activities in North and South Carolina, and was filed first in South Carolina on Tuesday afternoon. The North Carolina filing is scheduled to follow on Thursday.

Regulators in both states have to review the proposal, and approve it (separately) after gathering public input. Duke is expecting the process to take until mid-2024 in South Carolina and late 2024 in North Carolina.

The current plan dates from 2022.

The nuclear proposal isn’t new, but publicly identifying Belews Creek as a prospective site for it is. Inclusion in the Integrated Resource Plan is but one of many regulatory hurdles to overcome, but Duke hopes to have the first unit on line there in 2034, Norton says.

“Advanced” nuclear is a euphemism for a move to modular, manufactured reactors of the sort the U.S. Navy has relied on for decades to power its submarines and aircraft carriers. (The USN put a nuke plant in only one of those, the USS Long Beach, which was decommissioned in 1994.)

They differ in kind from the large, one-off, custom-designed nuclear stations, like Duke’s Shearon Harris plant near the Triangle, that have dominated the power industry in decades past. Backers hope they’ll be more cost- and space-efficient.

The Integrated Resource Plan covers the entire mix of power-generation and storage plants Duke would like to build in the coming years — not just the nuclear ones — to meet customer demand and its carbon-reduction goals.

It posits the construction of 6 gigawatts of solar by 2031 (3.3 gigawatts more than the 2022 plan), 1.2 gigawatts of onshore wind power by 2032 (900 megawatts more than in the 2022 plan), and the preservation of options for building 1.6 gigawatts of offshore wind plants for 2033 or later.

Duke wants to have 2.7 gigawatts of battery storage capacity by 2031, to extend the value of energy generated from solar plants (mostly) into the nighttime hours. That builds on an initial foray into battery storage near Asheville. Duke’s new filing proposes 2.1 gigawatt more storage than did the 2022 plan.

The utility wants to have 5.8 gigawatts worth of natural-gas plants that are also capable of running on hydrogen, against the day when transmission and storage of that cleaner-burning fuel is more widely available. That’s 2.7 gigawatts more than in the 2022 plan, and it includes placing coal-fired facilities in Person County and Catawba County.

Hydrogen’s prospective use is a bit controversial these days, with the Biden administration wanting to push the industry in that direction, and some industry groups and politicians pushing back with the argument that the infrastructure for it’s not there.

But Duke is part of a consortium that’s seeking federal aid to overcome that, and is “a finalist for that funding,” Norton says.

Moreover, “I’m not sure if any vendors are designing plants that aren’t hydrogen-capable at this point,” he says. “Based on where industry is going, that’s where everyone is aiming.”

Finally, Duke continues to count on upgrading the Bad Creek Pumped Storage Project, which is in South Carolina’s Oconee County amid the North/South Carolina border mountains.

As did the 2022 plan, the utility figures on getting 1.7 gigawatts more from the Bad Creek hydro project, which pumps water some 1,200 feet uphill from Lake Jocassee into a reservoir during low-load periods and holds it there for later release into a set of turbines to generate peak power.

Norton says the plan is to build a second powerhouse that would allow Duke to move twice as much water as it can now and generate twice as much electricity

“It’s now a 24-hour battery; this would make it a 12-hour battery at full throttle,” he says, noting that Duke doesn’t intend to expand the storage reservoir. “But we would be able to generate twice as much energy in a shorter duration.”

For perspective on all these numbers, the Catawba Nuclear Station, which is in York County, S.C., near Charlotte, has two reactors (one partially owned by Electricities members), each of which can generate about 1.1 gigawatts of electricity.

Duke Energy has proposed building new nuclear reactors at its Belews Creek coal and natural-gas fired station in North Carolina and a second site still to be determined.

It’s part of a newly-filed update to Duke’s 2022 integrated resource plan as the utility aims to comply with North Carolina’s emission mandates. That 2021 law requires utilities to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. The law also calls for net-zero emissions by 2050.

In the updated filings, Duke offered three scenarios that would get the company to 70% by 2030, 2033 or 2035.

The utility prefers the 2035 timeline. By that year Duke is proposing to add 600 MW of capacity from two small modular reactor sites, with both sites being the same reactor technology.

“Advanced nuclear will provide significant operational flexibility that will be needed to support increased deployment of renewable energy resources,” said the utility in its latest filings.

In a timeline prepared in filings to regulators, the utility said it plans to choose an SMR technology for the Belews Creek site between 2023 and 2025. Duke plans to apply for an early site permit from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in mid-2025.

The projected in-service date for the Belews Creek SMR would be the first quarter of 2034, with the SMR at the second site coming online in the first quarter of 2035.

Duke plans to end coal-fired power generation at Belews Creek by 2036. The 2,200 MW, two-unit coal and natural gas plant is located on Belews Lake in Stokes County, North Carolina. In 2020 and 2021, natural gas was added to the station to allow up to 50% natural gas co-firing on both units.

Duke’s recommended 2035 portfolio also includes a “near-term action plan” that would build up additional solar and wind generation and provide more electricity storage in batteries by the early 2030s.

While Belews Creek would be retrofitted for new nuclear, Duke’s Roxboro and Marshall coal-fired plants would shift to natural gas. Duke says those combustion turbine plants would be able to blend hydrogen for electricity.

Duke Energy said it is also in the process of seeking 20-year license extensions for the 11 existing nuclear units operating at six plants in the Carolinas.

STOKES COUNTY, N.C. — Belews Creek Steam Station is moving on from coal. Duke Energy said after years of electricity produced in part by coal-fired plants, they are now moving to cleaner energy sources.

Bill Norton is the Principal Communications Manager for Duke Energy. He said that while Belews Creek Steam Station is still burning coal at the moment, that ash is already being rerouted.

“Behind us you have Belews Creek Steam Station itself. Now none of the ash from there is going into that landfill," Norton said. "That ash is either recycled into concrete or cement products, or it’s put in another landfill that was already on the site.”

However, Norton said Duke Energy had to figure out a plan to manage coal ash left behind from dozens of years of energy generation.

“That still left us with 12 million tons of coal ash in the ash basin that had accumulated over decades. We still needed to resolve that,"he said. "That’s why we’ve built the new landfill.”

Traditionally, that byproduct was managed in treatment facilities - called basins. Those basins are now being permanently closed so that the environment is protected.

“The existing coal ash was all here in the basin. It wasn’t impacting neighbors, wasn’t impacting water supplies, but for the long-term protection we needed to get a liner underneath. So that’s what a landfill allows," Norton said.

After the ash basin has been filled, it will be safely drained and excavated, then graded so that the area beside the landfill returns to a valley shape.

Duke Energy plans to make an announcement later this year about what type of generation will be replacing the coal at the plant.

“We’re looking at a combination of advanced nuclear, hydrogen capable natural gas, storage, and solar. It could be a combination of those," Norton said,

In essence, Duke Energy said they're getting out of coal, but not out of Stokes County.

“We already have infrastructure here, we have the transmission system here, we have well-trained workers here," Norton said. It makes all the sense in the world to replace this plant with something else right here in Stokes County that would keep the tax base here, keep the jobs here, keep the economy thriving."