The Bellefonte Nuclear Generation Station is located in Hollywood, Alabama and is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Originally, four reactors were planned. Unit One had reached eighty eight percent completion and Unit Two had reached fifty eight percent completion by 1988 when the TVA board suspended the project. The TVA spent over six billion dollars before work was stopped. Since then removal of equipment for use at other TVA power plants has reduced the effective completion to fifty five percent for Unit One and thirty five percent for Unit Two. What remains at the site is basically the buildings and foundations of reinforced concrete.
The TVA considered restarting and completing the construction of these two reactors. New equipment would have to be shipped to the site and all existing structures would have to be reinspected. The reactor designs would have to amended to include lessons learned in the last thirty five years as well as new regulations that have been put in place since work stopped in 1988. The new amended design has not been completed so the exact cost of completing this project is unknown.
The construction permits expired in 2006. The TVA requested a reinstatement of the construction permits in 2008 and the NRC did grant them the status of a "terminated" permit which would require reinspection of all systems to obtain the status of "deferred." In 2010, the TVA got an upgrade to a deferred construction permit. In 2011, the TVA board voted to move forward with Unit One. In 2013, the TVA cut the staffing at Bellefonte from five hundred and forty to one hundred and forty. In 2015, the TVA decided that it would not need a big power plant like Bellefonte for at least twenty years. In 2016, the TVA declared the Bellefonte plant as surplus and elected to sell it at auction.
Now an editorial by J. Winston Porter, a former assistant administrator of the EPA, suggests that the Southern Company which owns both Alabama Power and Georgia Power should purchase the Bellefonte plant and complete construction of the reactors. He says that it would bring thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent jobs to Alabama as well as billions of dollars in investments.
The Southern Company is currently constructing two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. It has just announced that it will spend about a hundred million dollars to explore a possible site for a new nuclear power plant in southern Georgia. Porter points out that it would be reasonable for Southern to consider purchase and completion of Bellefonte over starting from scratch at a new location since Bellefonte is expected to fetch around forty million dollars at auction. Purchasing Bellefonte with its existing structure for less than half the cost of just scouting a new location would seem to be a wise business decision.
While Porter's suggestions sound good, there are a substantial problems that must be considered. First of all, there is the question of whether the unknown costs of redesign, construction and reinspection for Bellefonte would ultimately be less than the cost of starting from scratch in Southern Georgia. There is also the fact that the TVA decided that a new big nuclear power plant was not going to be needed for twenty years in that region. If that analysis was sound, then it would not make sense for Southern to spend the money to acquire and complete Bellefonte.
Bellefonte Nuclear Generation Station:
