The Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant is located on the Tennessee River on the north shore of Wheeler Lake in northern Alabama near Decatur and Athens. The plant has three General Electric boiling water reactors that can each generate about one thousand one hundred megawatts. Unit One began operating in 1973, Unit Two in 1974 and Unit Three in 1976. The plant was built and is owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It went into operation in 1974. In 2006, the NRC licensed all three reactors for another twenty years.
The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles around the plant contains about forty thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles around the plant contains about one million people. The NRC estimates that there is an extremely low risk of an earthquake that could damage the plant. The plant is vulnerable to tornados and has had to be shut down because a tornado cut off external power to the site.
Unit One was damaged by a fire in 1975 and had to be shut down for a year for repairs. Temporary flammable sealing in the cable spreading room was set afire by a worker using a candle to check for air leaks and the fire spread through the control cabling for Unit One and Unit Two. This fire prompted review of and changes to the NRC fire codes for nuclear reactors. In 1985, all three reactors at the plant were shut down due to operational and management problems. In 2002, the TVA began work on restoring Unit 1 to operation and spent one billion eight hundred million to fix the reactor’s problems. Unit 1 finally began operating again in 2007.
Unit 2 was shut down in 1985 along with the other units. The necessary repairs and changes were made and Unit 2 was brought back into operation in 1991. In 2007, Unit Two had to be shut down for a day because the temperature of the water in the Tennessee River was too high for cooling water to be drawn from the river.
Unit Three was shut down in 1983 to inspect the recirculation system and remain out of service until 1984 when repairs were finished. In 1984, the water level in the reactor dropped below the safe level but the automatic safety equipment did not function. In 1985, the reactor was shut down to investigate problems with the instrumentation and other equipment. Unit Three was finally restarted in 1995 with at a cost of one billion four hundred thousand dollars.
Following the shutdown of all three Units in 1985, problems with equipment design and maintenance as well as poor training of the staff were identified. Senior managers brought in in 1986 to oversee repairs were found to have violated ethical standards. In 1987, almost thirty percent of the staff was found to be unqualified for their positions. In 1988 and 1989, the plant was found to be non-compliant with new fire protection regulations that had been prompted by the fire in Unit One in 1975. Many of these problems had been seen in the years before 1985 but the plant was allowed to continue to operate. It was reported by a watchdog group that the plant management allowed quality and nuclear safety to deteriorate in favor of keeping up the production of electricity. The entire licensing and regulatory process of the NRC was called into question by the problems at Browns Ferry.
At Browns Ferry we have poor design, poor maintenance, poor training, lack of ethics, sacrificing safety to profits, poor oversight, advanced knowledge of serious problems, climate change related temperature increases interfering with cooling water supply and tornado damage. One reactor was shut down for over ten years. I question whether this plant should have been relicensed in 2006. It sounds like a major nuclear accident just waiting to happen.
