A year after the Tennessee Valley Authority tried to terminate the sale of its Bellefonte Nuclear Plant because the buyer didn’t have a nuclear license, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving ahead to consider such a license transfer.
Former Chattanooga developer Franklin L. Haney, who is trying to become the first individual American to finish and own a commercial nuclear plant, submitted additional information this year in his attempt to gain the first transfer for a construction permit of an unfinished nuclear plant in the United States.
Haney’s Nuclear Development LLC won the bidding at a November 2016 auction by TVA of the Bellefonte site with his $111 million bid. But the sale was never completed because TVA claimed Haney had failed to obtain the required permission from federal regulators to transfer the construction permit at Bellefonte.
Haney didn’t submit his request for such a license transfer to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission until November 2018 and regulators said the initial request was incomplete and could not be processed. But after TVA tried to scrap the sale of Bellefonte, Haney sued TVA to maintain the sales agreement and a court ruled this spring that the dispute over the plant sale must proceed to trial, which is likely in 2020.
While TVA and Haney squabble over the sale of Bellefonte, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proceeding with reviewing the plans submitted by Nuclear Development LLC, including additional filings this year to supplement what regulators said initially were inadequate reports about the proposed buyers.