The Babcock & Wilcox Company (B&W) has received a USD 5 million grant from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission (TICRC) for its Integrated System Test (IST) facility in Bedford County, Va. The facility is located at the Center for Advanced Engineering and Research (CAER), currently being constructed at the New London Business & Technology Center. The grant supports further development of the B&W mPower™ reactor that represents a new generation of smaller, scalable nuclear power plants on track to be deployed by 2020. Babcock & Wilcox Nuclear Energy, Inc and Bechtel Power Corp have formed a joint company, Generation mPower LLC, to design, license and build the next generation of nuclear power plants based on B&W mPower reactor technology. All of the technical features of B&W’s mPower reactor are included in the IST, although the source of energy is electricity rather than nuclear.
