A fresh start for Bellefonte

When citizens groups and environmental advocacy organizations go up against TVA, the analogy of David vs. Goliath springs to mind. Advocacy groups generally operate on volunteer power and shoe string budgets. TVA has, well, everything else: huge staffs of expert engineers and lawyers, deep pockets and a history festooned with a legacy of successful far-flung projects across a seven-state region.

Nevertheless, TVA has experienced major defeats in some seemingly unequal contests, and some glaring lapses in management. A snail darter advocate stopped a TVA dam. Whistle blowers called attention to a raft of neglected problems and shoddy work at Watts Bar nuclear plant that required expensive and lengthy repair. And the rupture of a flawed storage lake for coal ash unleashed a spill of unprecedented volume at the Kingston coal-fired plant.

Given that checkered history, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League case against the restart of the Bellefonte nuclear plant on an outdated construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not seem quixotic.

The league seeks, with considerable logic, to force TVA to obtain an entirely new construction permit from the NRC if TVA’s management and its board decide to finish the long-deferred Bellefonte nuclear power plant. Which is also to say that the league believes the NRC should be required to withdraw the original construction permit for the plant — now nearly 40 years old — that it has reinstated since the TVA decided a few years ago to reconsider its options at the Bellefonte plant.

If TVA’s CEO, Tom Kilgore, seeks approval of a plan to restart the Bellefonte plant at the agency’s August board meeting, the league also wants the board to defer that request.

The league’s credibility is bolstered by its standing in a current lawsuit over restart plans for the plant in a federal district court in Washington, D.C.; by dissenting opinions by NRC members against some of TVA’s positions on the plant; and by logical concerns that have arisen since the recent Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan.

The league has documented the NRC’s prior dismissal of such considerations as Bellefonte’s location on this region’s vulnerable karst limsetone terrain, which is generally riddled with fractures, caves, unpredictable hydrology and induced sinkholes; and its location at a site that is virtually on top of one of the largest earthquake faults east of the Rocky Mountains, the Sequatchie fault. It further maintains, given the flaws discovered at the Fukushima plant, that the designs for the nuclear reactor vessels planned for the four units at Bellefonte are unsafe for a number of reasons.

League members also point out that after TVA finally mothballed the Bellefonte plant, which was begun in 1974, it also abandoned NRC oversight and monitoring protocols, and then subsequently allowed tubing, boilers and other equipment at the plant to be dismantled and used in other plants, or sold.

All these factors, along with design issues for the two types of reactors that the plan envisions using, the league believes, argue cumulatively for a fresh start under new NRC construction permit.

That, of course, would invoke a new environmental impact assessment, and a more rigorous consideration of the two types of reactors now tentatively envisioned for the site. TVA obviously would object. So might the NRC, which is integrally dependent on the extension of nuclear power.

But given the sharper insight into the ways problems can cascade in surprising circumstances — as evidenced by TVA’s late-coming acknowledgment of recent tornado-related problems at its Browns Ferry plant — nuclear safety must be the highest priority. More rigorous standards and a new construction license from the NRC are not too much to ask.