Steamy temperatures Friday put the Tennessee Valley Authority in hot water again over thermal limits on the Tennessee River water used to cool its plants.
TVA was forced to limit power production at its biggest nuclear plant near Athens, Ala., Friday when the water in the Tennessee River approached the 90-degree limit, utility spokesman Terry Johnson said.
All three reactors at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant were reduced to 50 percent power Friday afternoon to limit the heat going into the river.
The power cutback happened as temperatures neared 100 degrees across TVA’s seven-state region. The utility on Friday expected the highest single-day sales of the summer so far, with peak demand topping 30,000 megawatts.
But that peak fell short of the all-time high of 33,482 megawatts in August 2007, and TVA had no trouble keeping the juice flowing to power air conditioners across the Tennessee Valley.
“We don’t expect any problem meeting the peak and next week it should be cooler with some rains,” said Scott Brooks, a TVA spokesman in Knoxville. “There is still plenty of power to purchase and our generation has held up well.”
River water is used to help cool the steam used to generate electricity at TVA’s nuclear plants. Under its operating permits, TVA must limit the heat of the cooling water when discharging it back into the Tennessee River.
Early last week, Browns Ferry’s reactors were scaled back on power generation when temperatures got above 89 degrees.
TVA uses cooling towers at its Sequoyah and Watts Bar plants in Tennessee and the utility is proposing a closed loop system with cooling towers at the Bellefonte nuclear site in Alabama.
Nuclear power critics contend that TVA is likely to get in even more hot water with global warming and increased nuclear power generation at Watts Bar and Bellefonte.
“As temperatures rise through global warming, every nuclear utility is going to face this problem and it’s a real limit on nuclear power generation during hot days,” said Louse Gorenflo, a member of a TVA advisory task force studying energy options for the future and a supporter of the anti-nuclear group BEST (Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team).
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