TVA saves cents with sense
The Tennessee Valley Authority is making more sense these days – and finally watching ours: Our cents, that is.
The utility is shutting down eight more coal-fired power generators at three power plants in Kentucky and Alabama. And it is just saying “no” to private financier Franklin Haney who has said he wants to help pay for the completion of Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Jackson County, Ala., 40 miles southwest of Chattanooga.
Some of the 50-plus-year-old coal units will be replaced with more efficient gas-fired units. Gas is much cheaper now than coal. And these days, with still no permanent waste storage for spent nuclear fuel and rods — along with a growing understanding of how weather and natural disasters can affect nuclear power plants — the cost to complete nuclear reactors is doubling every time we turn around.
TVA President Bill Johnson told TVA directors Thursday that a new assessment indicates finishing one unit at Bellefonte would cost $7.4 billion to $8.7 billion. That’s about twice the last estimate of $4.9 billion in 2011. And that previous estimate was up from about $3 billion in 2008 (when TVA said it would cost up to $7.1 billion to build two reactors there). Bellefonte was started in 1974, and by 2008 already had cost more than $4 billion.
A billion here, a billion there …