Former TVA chairman rips agency's nuclear plans
12 Jun 2008 | 05:56 PM ET
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - A former Tennessee Valley Authority chairman says he's stunned the nation's largest public utility is now leading the country's nuclear revival.
S. David Freeman oversaw the cancellation of eight of 17 planned TVA reactors in the late 1970s and early 1980s after determining they were too expensive and unnecessary.
But TVA's nuclear program has rebounded. It has six reactors online today, is building a seventh reactor -- a $2.5 billion, 1,200-megawatt unit to open at the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee in 2013 -- and has applied to build two more at the unfinished Bellefonte site in Alabama.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects license applications for as many as 29 reactors at 20 sites nationwide during the next three years as part of the renewed interest in nuclear as an alternative to air-polluting coal. The Bellefonte application was among the first.
"I am appalled at the idea that the Tennessee Valley Authority is going back to nuclear power after the experience we had with it," Freeman told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday. "Frankly, of all the places on Earth where nuclear power failed, it was here in the valley." The federal agency still has more than $20 billion in debt on its books due largely to that previous nuclear push, and Freeman worries ratepayers will be facing billions of dollars more to build Bellefonte.
"How in the name of heaven could the Tennessee Valley Authority not remember how it got clobbered by this nuclear option financially?" the 82-year-old Freeman said.
Public outrage over rising rates "gave me the political power to stop those nukes" 30 years ago, he said. But now, "it is as though we are nuclear-holics and we are just going back for another drink." Freeman, an alternative energy advocate and longtime California resident, spoke from his hometown of Chattanooga. He was there to meet with environmental groups opposed to the Bellefonte plant and to address the Tennessee Environmental Council.
Knoxville-based TVA supplies electricity from coal-fired power plants, nuclear stations and hydroelectric dams. It also has a relatively small wind, sun and recovered landfill gas alternative energy program. TVA serves 8.7 million consumers in Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia.
Although TVA hasn't decided if it will actually build Bellefonte if it gets a license, the agency views nuclear as perhaps the best way to meet rising power needs.
"Folks are still trying to get that breakthrough (clean) technology in electric power generations. We just haven't gotten there yet," TVA spokesman Gil Francis said. "This (Bellefonte option) is an insurance policy that will provide TVA the means to continue to provide reliable power supply." But Freeman insists nuclear power isn't "green," either, because of waste that will remain hot for 500,000 years and currently has no permanent storage site in the U.S.
The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy last week filed a petition with the NRC to intervene in the Bellefonte license application.
The groups say the Bellefonte reactors "would endanger over a million people in three states living within 50 miles of the plant," and pose a risk that is "unneccesary and wholly out of proportion to any possible benefit." TVA, which has applied for the license as part of a group of utilities and equipment manufacturers called NuStart Energy Development LLC, estimates the process could take up to four years.
Meanwhile, Francis said the agency is giving new attention to energy efficiency and conservation programs -- a hallmark of Freeman's tenure at TVA -- with the aim of "slowing the demand for power by 1,400 megawatts by 2012" -- equal to the output of one new reactor.
Freeman, who led several other utilities after leaving TVA, is currently chairman of the board that oversees the Port of Los Angeles. His latest book is "Winning our Energy Independence -- An Energy Insider Shows How." |
