Sohn: What about a Bellefonte solar and wind farm?

The idle Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., may soon be up for sale.
The idle Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., may soon be up for sale.

You've got to love TVA. It only took the government agency-turned nonprofit ratepayer-funded utility some 43 years and more than $5 billion to decide we don't need Bellefonte Nuclear Plant.

Soon the agency hopes to hang a for sale sign on the 1,600-acre site - and perhaps the unfinished plant itself. TVA determined last year that it will not have a need for Bellefonte for the next 20 years, and it costs several million dollars a year just to maintain and secure the plant.

The on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again nuclear plant that was started in 1974 essentially has for years been a ghost town on a peninsula of the Guntersville Reservoir on the Tennessee River in Hollywood, Ala., near Scottsboro. Work there ground to a halt in 1988. That was when TVA put construction of the Unit 1 reactor - then about 90 percent complete - on hold. Two years before, TVA had stopped working on the Unit 2 reactor, then about 58 percent complete.

It's worth noting that the initial cost estimate for the completed plant was $650 million, according to an archived GAO report.

The report, under a heading titled "Status Cost," states: "This estimate was based on an earlier estimate for the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant and adjusted for inflation. The estimate was rough because the Watts Bar estimate was based on minimal data. TVA's current official estimate prepared in August 1974 totals $1.0 billion." (It's worth noting that the second unit at Watts Bar, also after 43 years of delay, was just recently completed for an overall plant cost of more than $6 billion.)

But back to Bellefonte: In November 2013, after toying with ideas of converting the plant to a combined-cycle, natural gas plant and gutting parts of the idled nuclear plant, then replacing some of the gutted parts during one of the fanciful fits of pie-in-the-sky nuclear renewal, TVA officials offered a new completion assessment that raised the finished price of just one reactor to between $7.4 billion and $8.7 billion. And that was up from a 2011 estimate of $4.9 billion.

Then just three years ago, TVA flirted with a $10 billion offer from former TVA Chairman Dennis Bottorff and financier Franklin L. Haney, who wanted to buy the plant and finish one Bellefonte reactor if TVA would guarantee purchase of its power. TVA rejected the offer.

If you have a headache, it's understandable. The shark that ate your wallet for the cost of electricity also took the seat of your pants and part of your posterior.

But that's just the point here.

TVA should be applauded for finally abandoning the pipe dream of another outlandishly expensive nuclear plant amid continually dropping electrical demand in this age of better technology and energy conservation - albeit billions of dollars too late.

But is selling the plant and property really the right option?

Certainly having a private financier running a nuclear plant is frightening.

On the other hand the plant site doesn't have to be nuclear powered, and it already has two mega-voltage switch yards and a ready electrical grid - along with office buildings, warehouses, a training center, parking lots, railroad spurs, a helicopter landing pad and 1,600 acres of flat, riverside yard.

Can we say solar panels? Such a farm this would be. Cut the trees, mulch them in place. Grow power.

Can we say wind turbines? There's nothing else there. Make this a combo wind/solar farm.

Think of the new jobs for Scottsboro and North Alabama.

You've got to love TVA. Except when its leaders do one dumb thing after another.

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