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Commercial nuclear power plants are usually the Tennessee Valley Authority’s biggest source of electricity. However, this source of electricity plummeted this past year because outages plagued all seven reactors owned by the utility.
TVA reported fourteen unplanned or maintenance outages over a thirteen-month period, according to a review of data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. TVA has not responded to multiple requests for comments to verify the number of outages. At least twelve of the outages were “forced,” meaning they were unplanned, while two were planned for maintenance purposes.
The longest outage occurred at TVA’s Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., which has two reactors. The main generator of the second reactor failed in July 2024. TVA undertook additional nuclear life extension projects during the extended, eleven-month outage, and the new generator is expected to last another forty years, according to TVA spokesperson Scott Fiedler. On June 24th 2025, just one day after TVA brought this reactor back online, the entire nuclear plant failed because of a cooling water shortage during a heatwave.
Tim Rausch was the TVA’s top nuclear official. Two weeks later, on the same day as a forced outage at the Watts Bar Nuclear, Rausch resigned. Rausch joined TVA in 2018 and managed the entire nuclear fleet, making fourteen million dollars between fall 2018 and fall 2024, according to the utility’s financial filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Rausch plans to step down by March 2026, halfway into the next fiscal year.
TVA reported twelve unplanned nuclear outages to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission between July 2024 and August 2025.
Occasional nuclear outages are not especially unsafe. None of these outages were directly related to the nuclear reactors.
Todd Allen, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan said, “The fact that it’s a forced outage doesn’t mean danger. Sometimes it can be as simple as a piece of critical equipment fails to operate as normal.” However, outages are a risk to reliability and costs.
TVA owns seven nuclear reactors among the Sequoyah, Watts Bar and Browns Ferry plants. The plants together account for about one fifth of TVA’s total energy capacity. TVA generally keeps its nuclear plants in constant operation, except when refueling uranium, so nuclear is usually about forty percent of the utility’s total energy use in a normal year. This year, nuclear power dropped to lowest share of the energy mix since 2007.
But the use of nuclear power dropped by about thirty percent between the 1st of September 2024 and June 30th 2025 compared to the same period the year before, according to TVA. The utility replaced more than ninety percent of that lost power with fossil fuels.
Tom Rice is the TVA’s chief financial officer. He said, during a board meeting in August, “That generation was offset with natural gas, purchased power, which is primarily natural gas, and very strong performance by the coal fleet this year.”
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