Enough energy would be produced to supply power to 750,000 homes if the Tennessee Valley Authority gets the go-ahead to complete a long-idled reactor at Bellefonte Nuclear Plant, southeast of Chattanooga near Scottsboro, Ala.
At a time when TVA has already agreed, for environmental reasons, to close about half of its coal-fired plants, the electricity that Bellefonte would produce is obviously very much needed. When construction on the Bellefonte plant was suspended in 1988, there had been a decline in power demand. But today, demand for energy is expected to rise, and nuclear power is one big part of meeting our nation’s energy needs.
“[I]f we’re going to talk about energy and electric policy, we’ve got to think bigger than just the customer demands we have now,” said Tom Kilgore, CEO and president of TVA.
It is also important for the United States to reduce its reliance on oil imported from unstable or unfriendly nations in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Assuming that approval is granted to complete the reactor at Bellefonte, it will be neither cheap nor quick. The reactor is about half complete, and it will cost $4 billion to $5 billion more to finish it, Kilgore noted. It is projected that Bellefonte could begin supplying energy by 2018.