Bellefonte set for use if TVA makes a decision

Bellefonte set for use if TVA makes a decision

12/02/02

KENT FAULK
News staff writer

BELLEFONTE It's clear to Steve Brazelton what the Tennessee Valley Authority should do with its Bellefonte Nuclear Plant.

"I think they should finish it, because it would give me a job," said Brazelton, a pipefitter who worked eight years on the plant's construction during the 1980s.

Brazelton said he was laid off from his pipefitter job Nov. 22 after his company finished a job at TVA's Widows Creek plant up stream along the Tennessee River from Bellefonte. He joins the ranks of the 7.4 percent of Jackson County residents who were unemployed in the latest state estimates.

Twenty-eight years after construction began on Bellefonte, the plant remains unfinished. TVA hasn't decided what to do with the $4.6 billion in buildings and equipment.

Some, such as Brazelton, say finish it for the thousands of temporary construction jobs and hundreds of permanent jobs it would produce.
Others say finish it as some type of gas-fired plant that wouldn't create nuclear waste and still create jobs.

Thelma Wiggins, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the nuclear industry has a goal of adding new plants around the nation that can generate 50,000 megawatts by 2020. She said the institute applauds TVA for moving to finish the Browns Ferry reactor and would support TVA if it decided to complete Bellefonte.

Nuclear or natural?:

But while the Browns Ferry project was encouraging to those in the nuclear power industry, no company has requested to begin construction on a new nuclear power plant, due in part to the multibillion dollar costs. And no company has tried to complete an unfinished reactor that's been sitting around as long as Bellefonte.

Qualls believes Bellefonte could be completed as a nuclear plant. Hundreds of modifications were made to Bellefonte after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 in which some radioactive gas and water was released, Qualls said. At the time construction stopped, it was the most modern and up-to-date nuclear plant in the United States, he said.

Others feel the plant shouldn't be completed as a nuclear plant because of concerns about safety and future nuclear waste disposal.

Bellefonte would be a perfect site for TVA to consider for a natural gas-powered production plant, said Ulla Britt Reeves, clean air regional director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Area slow to progress:

Progress has always been slow at Bellefonte.

The peninsula along the Tennessee River was incorporated into a town and named the county seat of Jackson County in 1821. Residents successfully fought the railroad coming through their town because of concerns about noise and fears it would hurt the river shipping and stage coach business, said State Rep. John Robinson, who lives in the area.

By the end of the century, Scottsboro was an important railroad-shipping center, it had become the new county seat, and Bellefonte had died as a town.

When the Tennessee Valley Authority came sniffing around for a place to build a nuclear power plant in the early 1970s, most traces of the town had vanished. Construction on Bellefonte Nuclear Plant began in 1974 with thousands of construction jobs and the promise of hundreds of permanent jobs. Robinson, whose wife's family fought to keep TVA from taking more than 1,500 acres of their ancestral land for the Bellefonte plant, said he would prefer a gas-fueled plant, which would still provide hundreds of jobs.

"I would hope that there could be something productive that could come from it," said Robinson. "There's a lot of money laying up there."

But like many skeptical residents, Robinson isn't confident it will be producing electricity anytime soon.

"It may be like the old town: It just may fade away," Robinson said.