President Barack Obama has resubmitted Marilyn Brown’s name as a member of the Tennessee Valley Authority board. Brown had served a term but Tennessee Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker opposed her being reappointed.Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee refused to bring President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Marilyn Brown for a second term on the TVA board before the Senate for confirmation in early January. That understandably left independent TVA analysts and critics aghast at their blind and blatant partisanship.
The senators didn’t reject Dr. Brown, an international expert on energy efficiency and a Nobel Prize winner in 2007 for her work on climate change, because she isn’t supremely qualified. Her outstanding record as a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and her highly ranked tenure as a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Public policy, along with her international standing, make her credentials unassailable.
Rather, Corker and Alexander rejected her nomination simply because they wanted another white male businessman on the board like the other four male nominees to the TVA they confirmed that day – a banker, a lawyer, an accountant and a businessman. More to the point, they apparently wanted someone without much knowledge of TVA’s core energy generation business, because they wanted new board members who would kowtow to their old political buddy, board Chairman Bill Sansom. And they clearly didn’t want a board member who would question TVA’s refusal to look seriously at renewable and alternative energy as an option to its dirty coal and costly nuclear addiction.
Our own senators apparently have never asked what’s wrong with the TVA status quo. Which is strange. TVA, after all, has been criticized for decades by nonpolitical and environmentally concerned people for clinging to its traditional reliance on old dirty coal plants, dangerously dammed above-ground coal-sludge ponds and its flawed optimism about its nuclear plants. The latter is especially mystifying: TVA’s beleaguered nuclear program is the source of most of its debt, still around $28 billion, and it’s been constantly plagued with multibillion-dollar cost overruns, doubled-and-doubled-again construction delays and an unending list of safety violations.
The problems seem endless. The projected finish of the second unit at Watts Bar, for example, has been set back twice, while the projected cost of finishing it has doubled twice. The current schedule calls for it to be finished by 2016 at a cost of over $6 billion. But that’s questionable since TVA was cited last week for not testing thousands of parts installed at Watts Bar since 1995, and at its other two nuclear plants, Sequoyah and Brown’s Ferry.