Watts Bar productive in 1st year

Watts Bar productive in 1st year
By Duncan Mansfield
The Associated Press
KNOXVILLE — The Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, criticized as a $7 billion-dollar lemon during its more than two decades of construction, marked its first year of commercial operation Tuesday.
The single-reactor station, the last of its generation, operated at 84 percent capacity over the past year and generated 8.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
It was enough electricity to power Chattanooga, Dayton and Athens, Tenn. And it was at a capacity factor exceeding an industry average of 65 percent for startup reactors.
"We probably had the best first year of any nuclear plant," said John Scalice, Watts Bar nuclear vice president.
Even critics were impressed.
"The reality is that Watts Bar actually has performed quite well in its first year," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Tennessee Valley Energy Reform Coalition.
But Smith said time will be the ultimate test for the reactor located on the banks of the Tennessee River, midway between Knoxville and Chattanooga some seven miles from Spring City.
"If Watts Bar performs this well for the next 10 or 15 years then I think it will be looked on as having been a good investment," he said.
"If it starts to have problems, which many of us feel it probably will because of the way it was built, then the jury will rule it was imprudent to bring it on line."
Watts Bar, which had large sections rewired and reworked to comply with conditions of licensing, has suffered three short outages in the past year when systems tripped in the non-nuclear side of the plant.
"We attribute it to a shakeout period of time," Scalice said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the plant high marks in an initial review in January.