The Tennessee Valley’s long nuclear nightmare at the Bellefonte plant in Hollywood, Ala., is over. The giant federally-owned regional power system says it will relinquish its Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction license after a 47-year failure to complete even one of its four originally-planned reactors.
Engineering News Record reported that TVA “won’t renew permits requiring it to maintain the partially completed 1,256-MW Bellefonte nuclear plant site in northeast Alabama—officially ending a private developer’s plan to finish work that was started in the 1970s and indicating other redevelopment plans.”
TVA, once the nation’s most aggressive nuclear power plant developer during the early 1970s, began changing its focus when the Carter administration came into power in 1977 and named the late TVA veteran lawyer and analyst S. David Freeman (1926-2020) TVA chairman. Freeman was skeptical of the costs of the power systems aggressive nuclear program. He began scaling it back.
TVA began construction of the first Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactors in 1975 near Hollywood, Ala., and later planned to follow with different PWR units. Work stopped in 1988, with the first unit about 88% completed, and the second at about 58%.
In 2005, TVA announced it would build two Westinghouse AP-1000 PWRs on the Bellefonte site. In 2009, facing falling power demand, the agency scaled back to supporting only one reactor at the site, and a year later authorized $248 million for continued work on the first B&W unit.
When the TVA board suspended the work on the project, the power system had already poured $6 billion into construction.
In 2013, then-TVA board chairman Dennis Bottorff and Chattanooga real estate developer Franklin Haney unveiled a plan to complete the two units with private, not TVA, funds and federal tax credits. In 2016, TVA decided it would not need the power from Bellefonte and announced a November an auction for the site, with a $36 billion price tag.
There were only two bidders. The winner was a firm established by Haney for the purpose of purchasing the site, which bid $111 million.
Haney’s Nuclear Development LLC was unable to get the NRC to approve transfer of the construction license for the project and TVA pulled out of the deal in late 2018. Haney sued TVA for alleged breach of contract. In August, a federal district court judge ruled in TVA’s favor and against Nuclear Development.
That led to this week’s TVA decision to relinquish the license.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)