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Part 1 of 2 Parts
Nuclear Development (ND) is a private company owned by real estate developer Franklin Haney and his family. ND has been involved in a long legal battle to purchase an unfinished nuclear plant from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The company just sent out a press release that revealed a new tactic in their quest to buy Bellefonte. The ND press release connected plans to buy the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant to the new push by the Biden Administration to mitigate climate change.
Bill McCollum is the CEO of ND and a former TVA executive. In the press release, he said, “There is a major mismatch between the strategy TVA’s previous leadership adopted and the new federal decarbonization targets. The public-private Bellefonte partnership we originally put forward — which is still on the table — is a real opportunity for TVA’s current leadership to fix that. That is why we are calling on TVA leadership and local and energy policymakers to take a fresh look at it.”
For many years, ND has tried to buy Bellefonte and sell power generated by the plant to the city of Memphis. The Bellefonte plant is owned by the TVA and located in the city of Hollywood, Alabama. Billions of dollars have been invested in the plant which has never generated a single watt of energy.
ND agreed to buy Bellefonte in 2016 for one hundred and eleven million dollars. ND then began an aggressive attempt to find cities that would buy the electricity generated by the plant. Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) is the city owned utility and largest local power company that belongs to the TVA. The pending deal between TVA with ND and ND negotiations with MLGW tempted MLGW to leave the TVA.
The deal for the purchase of Bellefonte by ND was supposed to close in 2018. However, the TVA did not sell the plant to ND because they said that ND had not secured the necessary permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). ND and the TVA continue to argue over the Bellefonte plant in U.S. District Court Northern District of Alabama, the jurisdiction where the plant is located.
The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis fought to unseal records of the case. They found that there is a dispute over the reasons that the deal was never completed. The TVA claims that the reason was because ND did not get the proper permits. ND argues that the decision by TVA was punitive and was based on the TVA fear that they would lose MLGW who was their biggest utility customer.
U.S. District Judge Liles Burke ruled on March 31 that the TVA had acted within the law when they did not sell the plant to ND because ND lacked the proper permits. However, his ruling also mentioned the remaining ambiguity with respect to the true motive of the TVA. The ruling set the stage for a trial.
Please read Part 2 next