T.V.A. plans to bring nuclear plant once deemed unsafe back online

In the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Texas, former oil developers (now self-proclaimed energy developers) are attempting to retrofit abandoned oil platforms with wind turbines. Using abandoned platforms can potentially save developers both time and money. Money is saved by avoiding the cost of dismantling and hauling away the platforms. The time savings is a result of taking advantage of the fact that the structures are already permitted in their current ocean locations.

Now the Tennessee Valley Authority is attempting to revive the U.S. nuclear industry with its version of a time-saving proposal that involves refurbishing a plant that was closed down for safety reasons more than two decades ago. I don't know about you, but the idea of operating a once-damaged nuke plant is not what comes to mind when images of a sustainable energy future come to mind. (GW)

A Nuclear Reactor Reborn

By Matthew L. Wald
New York Times
May 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, May 10 — The Tennessee Valley Authority plans to reopen its Browns Ferry 1 nuclear reactor this month — 22 years after it was shut for safety reasons and 5 years after extensive renovations began.

The move reflects the increased interest in nuclear power as an energy source, but the government agency’s willingness to spend $1.8 billion on the overhaul — almost as much as a new plant is supposed to cost — also shows just how hard companies think it will be to build a new plant.

Nuclear energy promises to deliver large quantities of electricity without contributing to global warming. But even though several utilities in the United States have talked about starting a new reactor — none have been ordered since the 1970s— no company has yet done so.

Browns Ferry 1, despite being out of use for more than two decades, enjoys the advantage of already having a license.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who once worked at Browns Ferry, said the decision to put so much into old technology was noteworthy. “Most people,” he said, “are going to buy the new iPod rather than an eight-track tape player.”

The decision to refurbish rather than start from scratch also saved time, with project completion anticipated in 60 months. The industry has tried hard to shorten the time needed to plan and build a new reactor, but still projects that it will be about 12 years.

Compared with starting fresh, fixing up an old plant is a simpler task from a regulatory point of view, said James R. Curtiss, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now a lawyer at Winston & Strawn, which specializes in the nuclear field.

“You’ve got many of the key regulatory decisions behind you,” he said. Using an old license avoids the need for what is likely to be a drawn-out and contentious public hearing.

Browns Ferry 1 is one of the very few places where the industry can use an existing license to add capacity.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has made changes in its licensing procedure that it says will make the process faster and more predictable, but some utilities are nervous about being the first to try it out.

Browns Ferry, in Athens, Ala., would be the first reactor to come into service in this decade. The last one was Watts Bar 1, also a T.V.A. plant, in Spring City, Tenn., in June 1996. Construction had been halted at Watts Bar 1 for years. The T.V.A. is now studying whether to finish Watts Bar 2, where most work stopped in 1988.

At Browns Ferry 1, the authority says it has installed about 150 miles of cable and more than 6 miles of pipes, an unprecedented effort at a completed plant. At the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association, Adrian Heymer, the senior director for new plant deployment, said that one reason for the extensive replacements was so “the paper trail would be re-established,” to assure that all the work was performed up to nuclear standards.

Mr. Heymer said that the project at Browns Ferry was a kind of rehearsal for new plant construction, showing that the industry could still manage large projects. It may not be ready to go on the road: any effort to build a number of new reactors, Mr. Heymer said, could run up against a national shortage of welders and other craft workers.

Last week, General Electric said it was ordering parts for a new reactor that it hoped would be built at North Anna, Va., adjacent to two reactors operated by Dominion. The reactor has not yet been ordered, however.

Last year, Constellation Energy of Baltimore ordered parts for a plant it hoped to build in Calvert County, Md., south of Washington, and adjacent to its Calvert Cliffs reactors.

As for the Browns Ferry renovation, Craig Beasley, a T.V.A. spokesman, said that the exact cost would not be known for some months, but would probably not be much more than $1.8 billion. The reactor’s power level is also being increased, and will eventually be over 1,200 megawatts if all goes as planned.

The standard measure for power plants is price per kilowatt, which is roughly the amount of generating capacity needed to run one window air-conditioner. It will come to about $1,500 at Browns Ferry.

Two years ago, Westinghouse was saying that its AP-1000 reactor could be built from scratch for about $1,400 a kilowatt of capacity. (Since that time, though, prices for stainless steel, concrete and other ingredients have gone up.)

The Nuclear Energy Institute predicted that after the first few were built, the cost would be about $1,200 a kilowatt, and that the first would cost closer to $1,400 — not counting the expense of borrowing money to finance construction.

T.V.A.’s decision suggests that it believes the figures may be too low.

The Browns Ferry project has a checkered history. The T.V.A. set out to build two reactors there in 1966, predicting operation by 1970 at a construction cost of $247 million, plus $66 million for the first load of fuel. Unit 1 opened in August 1974, and Unit 2 the following year, at a cost of more than $500 million, or about $2 billion in today’s dollars.

In March of the following year, an electrician was using a candle in a room full of cables, under the control room, to look for air leaks, a procedure that the authority described as normal. He set a fire that burned for hours and disabled the reactor’s emergency core cooling system.

The fire is still regarded as the second most serious commercial nuclear accident, after the meltdown at Three Mile Island in March 1979. It set off a nationwide effort to make sure that safety equipment, all with backups at the ready, did not have cables running together through single cable trays and ducts.

The reactor reopened, but 10 years later, in March 1985, the T.V.A. shut all three of the reactors on the site because of numerous safety problems. Unit 2 reopened in May 1991, and Unit 3 in November 1995.

As the plant sat idle for 22 years, the clock was ticking on its 40-year operating license. But in May 2006, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted a 20-year extension on all three Browns Ferry plants.

The reactor now being restarted might go longer than the extra 20 years, said Julian J. Steyn, an industry consultant, because it has so little operating time.

“There is nothing to say they couldn’t get another 20,” he said. And with the prospect looming of taxes and other costs on the carbon dioxide and other pollutants produced by fossil fuels, Browns Ferry 1 could enjoy the advantage that it “will not be subject to taxation for global warming and acid rain reasons as we go down the road.”