If we were thinking that a private businessman buying Bellefonte Nuclear Plant might mean the unfinished, mothballed and gutted power plant would stop sucking electricity ratepayers and taxpayers dry, we’d best guess again.
The buyer, financier and former Chattanooga developer Franklin Haney, plans a revival of Alabama’s biggest construction project. The plant, according to five congressmen, already has cost TVA $9 billion since 1975 when work began. Now those five congressmen – four from Alabama and our own Tennessee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann – want us taxpayers and ratepayers to help again. This time, they want us to subsidize Haney’s privatization of nuclear power with as much as $6 billion in government-backed loans and $2 billion in production tax credits.
Yes, you read that right. Haney wants to use OPM. That’s Other People’s Money, mostly ours, to the tune of at least $2.5 billion and maybe as much as $9.5 billion if you count the loan guarantees we’ll be on the hook for, to finish a plant that was started 43 years ago and has never generated a single watt of electricity.
To complete the work, Haney, a multi-millionaire who has a membership at Mar-A-Lago and hosted former Trump fixer Michael Cohen on his yacht shortly before Cohen’s law office was raided by the FBI, also has enlisted the help of the four Alabama congressmen and Fleischmann to seek that $6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy through the DOE Advanced Nuclear Loan Guarantee program.
Our congressmen made the ask for President Donald Trump’s support for the loan on May 14, 2018, and noted that Haney’s company, Nuclear Development LLC, is investing in “excess of $1 billion of its own money” into the $11 billion total cost to complete construction.