Going nuclear

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Jul 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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There are few places on Earth where men outnumber women 2-to-1.

And few parishes in Louisiana that generate 23 times more electricity than the local population consumes.

Throw one more piece of trivia into the mix — two high-profile nuclear power projects could select this place for billions worth of capital investment — and you have the makings of a new game-changing economic event in West Feliciana Parish.

The parish’s gender makeup is an accident of geography. About 5,000 men call the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola home in a parish of 15,000.

The electrical equation is a consequence of Entergy Corp.’s River Bend nuclear plant churning out about 1,000 megawatts of power, enough for 8 percent of the state’s needs.

And here’s what’s emerging on the horizon:

n By year’s end, Entergy Corp. will apply for a new nuclear reactor in a potential multibillion-dollar project south of St. Francisville. Construction wouldn’t begin for three to four years. It’s also possible Entergy won’t build the reactor. Or that it will build one first at the Grand Gulf nuclear plant in Port Gibson, Miss.

n The Shaw Group Inc. of Baton Rouge is being wooed by several Southern states for a nuclear components manufacturing center that would employ 500 people and expand to 1,000. A site near the dormant Tembec paper mill could lure Shaw, which separately has produced a consulting study for building a new port near the John J. Audubon Bridge under construction.

Shaw already has orders for four nuclear reactors to be built in Georgia and South Carolina, pending regulatory approval. It expects more orders from Florida; it’s vying for business in South Africa and India. And it’s already designing reactors in China that that nation will build itself.

A very real possibility exists that Shaw’s nuclear manufacturing project will go elsewhere. Shaw’s Power Group is based in Charlotte, N.C., and its early domestic nuclear customers are all near the East Coast. That potential movement away from Shaw’s Baton Rouge headquarters is what worries Steve Jones.

“The key there is we had the opportunity way back in the ’50s to be Houston, Texas,” said Jones, chief executive officer of the West Feliciana Community Development Foundation. “We could have been the petroleum capital — Baton Rouge could have — and we missed it: We didn’t do what was necessary.”

In 2007, the then-president of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, Stephen Moret, began articulating a plan for the Baton Rouge region to be a center for nuclear power excellence and the potential nuclear power capital of the United States — in an engineering, design, fabrication and learning sense that fits the project Shaw is contemplating.

Now serving as the state’s economic development secretary, Moret said Louisiana continues to pursue the concept — and Shaw. He said multiple regions in the state could benefit from nuclear power growth.