Dominion Energy Virginia is seeking a 20-year renewal of the early site permit (ESP) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued for its North Anna nuclear power plant site in Virginia. North Anna’s current ESP is set to expire on November 27, 2027.

On July 14, Dominion submitted the ESP renewal request for North Anna; the site in question is adjacent to Unit 1 and Unit 2 of the Louisa County, Va., facility. The NRC acknowledged receiving the application on July 28 and will now review the application before docketing it in the Federal Register and commencing with the review process.

During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.

In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.