The Watts Bar Dam site in Spring City, Tenn., taken from across the dam inside the Meigs County line off state Highway 68.
Photo by Kimberly McMillianLegal motions filed Thursday by 25 environmental and anti-nuclear groups claim the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is legally required to slow down the licensing and relicensing of U.S. nuclear reactors after NRC’s own review of the Fukushima disaster and resulting recommendations.
Among the licenses at 18 plants mentioned in the filings are TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant’s nearly finished Unit 2 in Spring City, Tenn., and the unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Athens, Ala.
Watts Bar’s new $2.5 billion reactor is expected to be completed in 2013, and the proposed completion of Bellefonte is on the Tennessee Valley Authority board agenda for Thursday.
Staff Photo by Matt Fields-Johnson
The Unit 1 turbines sit idle at the TVA’s Bellefonte nuclear power plant in Hollywood, Ala.Louis Zeller is an attorney with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, one of the groups filing the motion aimed at Bellefonte. He called the filings administrative legal actions “with all the trappings of lawsuits.”
“The [NRC] task force made some good, sound recommendations in its review of Fukushima,” Zeller said. “But what we’re afraid of is that those recommendations will sit on the shelf [at NRC] and the agency will proceed as if nothing happened. So our job is to make them take these recommendations into account before these plants are licensed.”