Site manager Jim Chardos talks Wednesday inside of cooling tower 2 at the still-uncompleted Bellefont Nuclear Power Plant in Hollywood, Ala.It is truly mind-numbing to comprehend the vast waste of ratepayer and taxpayer money lost on the siting, building, scrapping, building again and now abandoning Bellefonte Nuclear Plant.
We've spent between $5 billion and $6 billion on the unfinished plant since 1970 when the Tennessee Valley Authority announced it and began construction four years later on a 1,600-acre plot in North Alabama between Highway 72 and the Tennessee River in Jackson County.
The plant never produced even a spark of electricity, and now TVA has put a "for sale" sign on it, seeking a $36.4 million minimum bid - the appraised value of the 1,600 acres of riverfront property around the plant.
Just to review, we've spent $5 billion plus (billion with a "b"), and our first and only return is expected to be about $36 million (million with an "m").
"Even if the site's appraised value of $36 million is realized, TVA customers will get back less than a 2016 penny for each of the $6 billion they have spent on the site over 46 years," writes Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an adjunct professor at Vermont Law School where he has taught "Nuclear Power and Public Policy." Bradford, who also is the vice chairman of the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote about Bellefonte in the June publication of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
To understand the full folly of the giant sucking sound Bellefonte created in our collective wallets, one must look at Bellefonte's history.
When construction began in 1974, TVA had almost no experience in operating a nuclear unit, yet the utility had 16 reactors under construction and one that had begun operating just a few months before at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens, Ala. All of TVA's plants were at least four times larger than the largest plant that had operated for any length of time anywhere in the United States. And all were intended to be completed in the 1970s.
In those early nuclear-dream times, the Atomic Energy Commission had forecast 1,000 reactors in the U.S. by the year 2000.
Our Bellefonte is now the poster child of those pie-in-the-sky plans. Only seven TVA reactors were completed, and America today has 100 operating reactors, down from a peak of 112 in 1990.
The other 10 TVA reactors - plus two announced in 2007 - are canceled, "with at least $10 billion in customers' money spent on them, in addition to some sweeteners" from U.S. taxpayers in the form of subsidies, according to Bradford.
The two original Bellefonte reactors were the last ordered from Babcock & Wilcox, the designers of the plant that melted half its core at Three Mile Island in 1979. That put extra scrutiny on Bellefonte, where construction even before the melt-down was far, far behind schedule. TVA finally halted work on Unit 2 in 1985 and ceased work on Unit 1 three years later. The reactors were 55 and 88 percent complete, respectively.
Eight years later, TVA toyed with converting the plant to combined cycle natural gas, but soon nixed the idea. In 2001, Texaco proposed using Bellefonte as a coal gasification plant, and Chattanooga financier Franklin Haney offered to finance its completion as a nuclear plant. Texaco dropped its proposal; TVA turned Haney down.
In 2005 Nustart Energy coalition, flush with Congress-approved subsidies, picked Bellefonte as a site to try out a new reactor design when TVA thought it could convert the original reactors for less money than building from scratch. But it turned out that energy efficiency in new homes, appliances and factories, along with a shift to cheaper natural gas, was a real savings. Bellefonte work was again halted.
In 2006, TVA began cannibalizing Bellefonte - selling steel tubing and pipes, along with copper and even the generators from the cob-webbed plant. TVA also announced that the utility would cease conducting inspections and quality assurance records-keeping there.
But TVA in 2008 reversed itself again and decided to revive the original units. This time, TVA said the reactors would be completed by 2017 and 2021. Guess what? Work on Unit 2 was canceled for the third and apparently final time in 2009. In 2011, TVA said French vendor Areva would complete Unit 1. But Areva, in dire financial straits, had to be bailed out by the French government in 2013.
By 2015, TVA was saying it had no need for more generation capacity for the next 20 years beyond what Watts Bar 2 will provide. TVA withdrew its license applications for the Bellefonte reactors and put the plant on the market.
Stay tuned. And say a Hail Mary for your wallet.