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C-SUITE CONVO
C-SUITE CONVO NEW PORT NEIGHBOR
BY VICKY JANOWSKI
PORT CITY LOGISTICS THIS SUMMER ANNOUNCED ITS PLANS TO BUILD A TRANSLOAD FACILITY IN WILMINGTON. THE $16 MILLION PROJECT IS EXPECTED TO BRING WAREHOUSE STORAGE SPACE TO HELP STREAMLINE TRUCKING SOLUTIONS AT THE PORT.
The third-party logistics company committed to creating 75 jobs in Wilmington as part of receiving up to $337,000 in state and local incentives. It also has leased office space in downtown Wilmington for transportation and administrative support.
Below is a recent Q&A with Eric Howell, CEO of the Savannahbased company. To read more, go to WilmingtonBizMagazine.com.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE PROJECT PORT CITY LOGISTICS IS BUILDING NEAR THE PORT OF WILMINGTON AND WHERE IT STANDS NOW?
“Port City’s operational focus is on getting shipping containers – TEUs – out of ports fast so that our customers receive their products in a dependable manner without time or steps wasted. One of our keys to success over the years in Savannah, Georgia, has been our close proximity to the port, which gives our trucks quicker turn times and increases our ability to manage peak volumes.
We hope to duplicate that success in Wilmington by building a
ERIC HOWELL
CEO, PORT CITY LOGISTICS
150,000-square-foot, high-velocity transload facility on Raleigh Street. The new facility will have 250 trailer parking slots and 45 dock doors on each side of the building so that we can maximize the TEU throughput of customers coming through the Wilmington container terminal, less than a mile away.
We are making great progress and are currently in the process of finalizing all of our government approvals with the city of Wilmington, New Hanover County and the state of North Carolina.
As of early November, most of our civil engineering plans have been completed, and we are in the final stages of our architectural and design plans.
We expect to have architectural renderings for publication before year-end, and we plan to begin construction in the first quarter of 2023.”
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE THE COMPANY’S PRIMARY SERVICES AND CUSTOMER TYPES?
“We have a wonderful and very diversified customer base that we provide drayage trucking (transportation of containerized ocean freight from port to destination), warehouse distribution, inventory control and security, and outbound Over-The-Road transportation services to.
Each and every day, we handle a large volume of food and beverage products, electronics, general merchandise and retail products, and nonhazardous chemicals and resins.
The majority of our customers import their products from overseas, but we also have a strong base of domestic manufacturing customers that export their products. We distribute a lot of household brand names, and we are always looking for opportunities to help new customers.”
WHAT MADE THE COMPANY PICK WILMINGTON FOR THIS EXPANSION?
“For years, my wife and I have been visiting extended family in Wilmington, and it was on one such visit three years ago that I was able to spend time with the Wilmington Business Development and N.C. Ports teams.
Those meetings left a great impression and things continued to align from there.
Wilmington checks all of our boxes for expansion in that it (1) is a great place to work and live and visit – our company culture is paramount, and we have to enjoy the places where we expect our team members to spend their time; (2) has a growing port with excellent transportation infrastructure providing access to a large population base within an eight-hour truck drive; (3) has a thriving and fast-growing workforce from which to recruit; and
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C-SUITE CONVO
(4) has alignment across city/county/ state government entities.”
WILL THIS BE PORT CITY LOGISTICS’ FIRST FACILITY OUTSIDE OF THE PORT OF SAVANNAH AREA?
“Wilmington will actually be the second market outside of Savannah because we launched three new distribution facilities in the Greer, South Carolina, market … in 2022.
We currently have 3 million square feet under management in Savannah and 1 million square feet in Greer.”
WHAT TRENDS ARE YOU SEEING IN THE PORTS INDUSTRY THAT ARE DRIVING YOUR EXPANSION?
“Many of the major ports in the U.S. have been dealing with congestion and gridlock issues over the past couple of years. We want to be where containerized freight can flow the fastest and speed to market is celebrated.
With the fastest turn times of any container port in the U.S., the Port of Wilmington can gain significant market share and play a key part in the supply chains of a number of beneficial cargo owners with an HQ or significant commercial presence in North Carolina.
We also believe that it is better to be great in a few areas than to be mediocre in many. As a result, it’s our desire to be the logistics provider of choice for any customer that wants to import and get their products out to the population of the United States with ease and velocity. We strongly believe that Wilmington is well-positioned to streamline delivery across the United States.
Wayne Gretzky said, ‘Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been,’ and we believe the puck is going to Wilmington and the state of North Carolina.”
JOBS
JOLT
BY JOHANNA F. STILL PHOTO BY DARIA AMATO
ASIDE FROM AIMING TO CREATE ABOUT 500 JOBS IN NEW HANOVER COUNTY WITH AN AVERAGE SIX-FIGURE SALARY – NOTEWORTHY IN ITSELF – GE HITACHI NUCLEAR ENERGY’S CURRENT SLATE OF PROJECTS REPRESENTS A NEW FRONTIER FOR THE INDUSTRY.
Stateside, there’s a rebirth of nuclear technologies. As aging reactors continue to power a sizeable share of the nation’s carbonfree electricity, the next wave of nuclear innovations looks to deliver cost-effective, reliable and scalable solutions.
This comes as the Biden administration has set a goal for the U.S. to achieve a carbon-free electricity grid by 2035.
“You can add all the solar and wind that you want – and you should, by the way, absolutely,” said Jay Wileman, president and CEO of Wilmington-based GE Hitachi. “But it won’t get you there. You’ve got to have nuclear to be able to get to those net-zero aspirations.”
LOCAL LEAPS
Since 1969, General Electric has produced nuclear fuel in New Hanover County and chose its Castle Hayne campus as its nuclear headquarters in 2003.
The bulk of the business’s operations has historically entailed producing boiling water reactor fuel and engineering support for most of the reactors designed by the company globally (some have closed, but nearly 70 GE reactors were built in 10 countries, according to Wileman).
In recent years, GE Hitachi pivoted. In addition to maintaining its domestic and global engineering support and fuel production, the company began dedicating additional resources to two newer ventures: developing smallmodular reactor and sodium-cooled fast reactor designs. Cooled using different mechanisms, both emerging technologies represent advanced blueprints contributing to nuclear’s renaissance.
“That’s really driving our growth,” Wileman said.
As part of the shifted focus, in October Global Nuclear Fuel-Americas (GFA) – a GE-led joint venture with Hitachi – unveiled plans for a new fuel fabrication facility in Wilmington, expected to cost at least $85 million to build.
This local operation will create the next generation of fuel, produced with ultraenriched uranium, for the proposed Natrium advanced sodium fast reactor being designed by GE Hitachi and TerraPower, a company founded by Bill Gates. About 100 new employees are needed to power the new facility, according to TerraPower.
PHOTO COURTESY OF GE HITACHI
Through local performance-based incentive agreements with the city of Wilmington and New Hanover County, GE Hitachi is eligible for $1.5 million to create 485 jobs to support the Natrium fuel facility as well as work on the company’s separate small-modular reactor design, called the BWRX-300.
The Wilmington site’s depth of experience with fuel fabrication made it a prime candidate for GE Hitachi’s new fuel venture, according to Wileman.
“We have an existing facility and a license with the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission),” Wileman said. “And so, what better way to do it than just grow where we’re already good and we have a team here instead of a greenfield where you have to stand up all the infrastructure again?”
FEDERAL BACKING
Roughly 61% of the nation’s utilityscale electricity was generated by fossil fuels last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and about 19% was powered by nuclear energy.
In North Carolina, nuclear reactors provide three-fourths of the state’s carbon-free electricity, according to the EIA; the nearby Brunswick Nuclear Plant that opened in 1975 with reactors designed by GE is one of three in North Carolina, all operated by Duke Energy.
After a spate of activity with the construction of nuclear reactors between the ’60s and ’80s, domestic investment in new facilities and technologies dried up, in part due to high-profile nuclear accidents and a stronger appetite for cost-competitive natural gas.
“Every time you’d see a little momentum (in the nuclear industry) built, there’d be something that
YOU SHOULD, BY THE WAY, ABSOLUTELY. BUT IT
WON’T GET YOU THERE.
JAY WILEMAN PRESIDENT & CEO GE HITACHI
would come along and kill it,” said Tim Beville, the U.S. Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations’ acting associate director of project management for nuclear technologies.
The nation’s fleet of utility-scale reactors is decades old, Beville said, and some have shut down rather than receive upgrades. “Companies are loath to invest in those 1,000-megawatt reactors anymore,” he said. “They want to see things with more flexibility.”
Meanwhile, advanced designs have been making progress on an international scale.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work here for decades and decades trying to show that these designs can be built at some point and operated safely and moved into the commercial market. But more recently, there’s been a lot of movement in the international world,” Beville said. “China is developing sodium reactors. Russia’s got state-sponsored companies that are developing gas reactors. Congress is seeing this and saying, ‘Hey, what about us?’
“We’re a free-market economy, and we don’t have the state sponsorship to compete with these kind of capabilities.”
But lately, that’s changed. In the 2020 federal budget, Congress appropriated $230 million to launch the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP), to fund two new reactors to be cost-shared with the industry and constructed within five to seven years.
By October 2020, the Department of Energy had picked its two projects: X-energy’s gas-cooled reactor design, the Xe-100; and the Natrium sodiumcooled fast reactor design.
GE Hitachi’s new Castle Hayne facility will produce fuel for the proposed Natrium demonstration project reactor, planned near a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming (Similarly, X-energy is planning a fuel production facility to support its new reactor design).
Teams behind the Xe-100 and Natrium designs each received $80 million from the ARDP in 2020 and again in 2021 to help forge the concepts into realities. Then last year, Congress appropriated nearly $2.5 billion to the ARDP through fiscal year 2025 under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Beville, who leads the ARDP, said the amount – and mostly the fact that
it included pre-appropriated funds – was unheard of. “I’ve been in government for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
Through the cost-sharing agreements, the ARDP has committed nearly $2 billion toward the Natrium project and about $1.2 billion to the Xe-100 to help develop the advanced reactors.
“They’ll invoice us, and we’ll pay them 50% on the dollar for it,” Beville said.
To carry out a total financial split of the roughly $4 billion Natrium and $2.5 billion Xe100 projects (which includes the reactors and fuel facilities necessary to power them, like the one being built in Wilmington), Beville said more appropriation will be needed after 2025.
“If we’re going to fully fund these things, we’re going to need some more appropriation in the out years,” he said, “but I mean, that’s a pretty good start.”
Without government-backed assistance, Beville said he believes progress on both planned advanced reactors may not be occurring as promptly. “They may not have taken the risk, because the financial risk was way too high at the time,” he said. “But with a[n up to] 50% cost share, it really, really eases that burden.”
John Kotek, who was acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Obama administration, said the value of the wind production tax credit, for example, has been more than $4 billion annually over the last several years. “We haven’t had that for nuclear until now,” he said.
Kotek said that another piece of recent legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, is a “landmark in U.S. clean energy policy and will provide a springboard for a broad range of new nuclear projects in the U.S. over the next decade.”
Production tax credits set to begin in 2026 in particular will incentivize utility companies to invest in advanced or modern nuclear reactors, said Kotek, who is currently the Nuclear Energy Institute’s senior vice president of policy development.
Clean energy goals, many driven by state-level policies, have in part driven the urgency to decarbonize and the recent surge in federal nuclear support, Kotek said.
“We’ve gone from five years ago where you had essentially no U.S. utilities with a decarbonization commitment,” he said, “to a place now where more than 80% of the customers in the U.S. are served by a utility that has pledged to go largely or completely carbon-free by 2050 or sooner.”
A RUSSIAN MONOPOLY
Many next-generation nuclear reactor designs rely on fuel made with high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The nation’s existing nuclear fleet is powered using fuel enriched with 5% uranium; HALEU is enriched between 5% and 20%.
Today, there’s only one commercial source of HALEU across the globe: the state-owned Russian company TENEX.
Both X-energy and TerraPower had initially selected TENEX as their sole HALEU supplier in their ARDP applications, according to Beville.
“We originally were going to buy the first load over in Russia,” Tara Neider, TerraPower’s senior vice president said at the October groundbreaking event for the fuel facility in Wilmington. “We absolutely will not do that now.”
“On February 23rd of this year, everybody was thinking about nuclear for net-zero carbon,” Wileman said. “On February 24th ... they started thinking about nuclear as energy security,” he continued, referencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “So our phones have been ringing.”
Wilmington’s fuel facility is anticipated to be among the first
GE’S NUCLEAR HISTORY IN WILMINGTON
1967
GE BREAKS GROUND IN WILMINGTON ON A 1,600-ACRE SITE IN CASTLE HAYNE
1969
GE BEGINS OPERATIONS AT THE FUEL AND REACTOR COMPONENTS MANUFACTURING OPERATION
2007
GE FORMS A JOINT VENTURE WITH JAPANBASED HITACHI TO CREATE THE LOCALLY HEADQUARTERED GE HITACHI NUCLEAR ENERGY (GEH)
2018
GEH INSTEAD FOCUSES ON DEVELOPING A SMALL MODULAR REACTOR DESIGN, MUCH SMALLER THAN TRADITIONAL NUCLEAR PLANTS; THE BWRX-300 IS THE COMPANY’S 10TH GENERATION OF BOILING WATER REACTOR DESIGNS
2003
GE NUCLEAR ENERGY MOVES ITS HQ FROM SAN JOSE TO WILMINGTON
2016
GEH ANNOUNCES IT IS LEAVING A VENTURE TO DEVELOP SILEX LASER ENRICHMENT TECHNOLOGY THOUGH IT CONTINUES TO LEASE ITS WILMINGTON TEST LOOP FACILITY TO SILEX’S LICENSEE
2020
GEH PARTNERS WITH THE BILL GATESFOUNDED COMPANY TERRAPOWER TO DEVELOP THE NATRIUM REACTOR AND ENERGY SYSTEM THAT USES MOLTEN SODIUM INSTEAD OF WATER TO COOL REACTORS
OCT. 2022
OFFICIALS BREAK GROUND ON A NATRIUM FUEL FACILITY AT GEH’S CAMPUS; GEH ALSO ANNOUNCES PLANS TO HIRE ABOUT 500 PEOPLE IN THE COMING YEARS TO WORK ON BOTH THE NATRIUM AND BWRX300 PROJECTS
domestically to produce fuel using HALEU. Behind X-energy’s HALEU fuel production facility planned in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – which the company projects to be the nation’s first – the proposed Wilmington fuel plant is “probably the second-most” developed in terms of progress so far, according to Beville.
Work will begin next year on the Wilmington fuel facility, which is slated to be operational by late 2025, GE Hitachi officials said. Construction at the Natrium reactor site in Wyoming is expected to begin in 2025.
BIG THINGS, SMALL PACKAGES
In addition to work on the Natrium project, progress on GE Hitachi’s first-ever small-modular reactor (SMR) design also is key to the company’s growth.
This water-cooled design, the BWRX-300, is essentially a more compact and efficient version of existing boiling water reactors. In contrast, the Natrium design aims to use sodium as its coolant.
Unlike the HALEU fuel needed for the Natrium design, the BWRX-300 would rely on the boiling water reactor fuel GE Hitachi is already producing in Wilmington.
“Another big benefit is the fuel for this is exactly what I’m making,” Wileman said. “I don’t need to qualify a whole new fuel for this smallmodular reactor.”
The BWRX-300 is based on a previous, already-approved design, which officials believe will help fasttrack its deployment.
SMRs are smaller than traditional nuclear plants, and GE Hitachi’s design is more simplified, cutting down concrete and rebar by 90%, according to Wileman. The BWRX300 is 300 megawatts (MW); by comparison, each element of the twounit Brunswick Nuclear Plant has a generating capacity of about 930 MW.
Though it’s smaller, the SMR’s performance-by-megawatt will be about 50% better than traditional designs, Wileman said. “We’re making a standard plant that you can repeat over and over and over again,” he said. “That’s not how this first wave of reactors was built back in the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s.”
Wileman said the smaller design was intentional “to help facilitate, really a relaunch of nuclear.”
Momentum is already building behind the design.
Ontario Power Generation selected the BWRX-300 design for a planned facility, and GE Hitachi has potential deployment projects in the works with utilities ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to Polish-based Synthos Green Energy to SaskPower in Saskatoon, Canada.
“This is a highly gated process,” Wileman said of the licensing and engineering work required to meet regulatory benchmarks. “You want to make sure you get your engineering work all complete before you make that final decision to build,” he said, citing a cautious optimism that the new partnerships will result in new reactors.
This summer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved Oregon-based NuScale’s design, making it the first and only approved SMR template in the nation. Dozens more designs are underway, and GE Hitachi’s SMR design is in “pre-application status,” according to an NRC spokesperson.
GE Hitachi officials said they hope to deploy the design by the end of the decade.
NEW PROJECTS BY THE NUMBERS
$85M
Minimum local Natrium fuel facility construction cost
2025
Year the facility is expected to be operational
Federal funding to the Natrium project (the total amount committed to Natrium technology, jointly designed by GE Hitachi and TerraPower, including a demonstration project reactor in Wyoming and the local fuel facility)
NEARLY
$2B
485
Number of employees GEH plans to hire in the coming years for the fuel plant and work on its BWRX-300 small-modular reactor
As GE Hitachi shifts pace with advanced technologies, the greater General Electric structure is preparing for a major reorganization.
Last year, the conglomerate announced it would split into three public companies, focused on aviation, health care and power. GE Hitachi will fit into the power arm, recently renamed GE Vernova, in the tax-free spinoff set for early 2024.
Earlier this year, GE Hitachi began its latest hiring spree to gear up for its Natrium and SMR projects, hiring more than 250 for its Wilmington campus. (Along with GE Aerospace, which has 530 employees, GE companies in Wilmington employed 3,100 as of last December, making them the area’s largest for-profit employer.)
Wileman said he needs “every flavor of engineer you can think of” – nuclear, mechanical, civil, electrical and more – to support the company’s endeavors, with an average $131,000 salary for the new jobs.
Sean Sexton, GE Hitachi’s executive vice president of advanced nuclear, said he sees Wilmington being the global epicenter of advanced nuclear growth.
“The amount of people,” he said, “we need to hire to execute what we have on our plate today is tremendous.”
DETERMINING THE 100
The WilmingtonBiz 100 is an annual Greater Wilmington Business Journal initiative to recognize the top 100 Power Players, Influencers, Innovators, Connectors and Rising Stars impacting Southeastern North Carolina’s business landscape.
Those included in this year’s group were announced in October, but on the following pages you can read a little more about why they were picked.
Readers sent in names to consider during a nomination process, and the Business Journal’s editorial team selected the WilmingtonBiz 100. We’ll do nominations again next year for the annual issue.
To be considered, individuals had to either work or live in the region. Elected officials aren’t considered for the list.
25 POWER PLAYERS 37 INFLUENCERS 51 INNOVATORS 63 CONNECTORS 79 RISING STARS
– Compiled by Johanna Cano, Vicky Janowski, Miriah Hamrick, Cece Nunn and Johanna F. Still
