Undoing the Mothballs: Long-Abandoned Nuclear Reactors Eyed for Restart

There has been a lot of talk of next-generation reactors in the U.S. "nuclear revival," but some plans for new nuclear power generation are looking back rather than ahead.

Alongside a multitude of pending applications for new nuclear reactors, there is a move to restart construction at sites where the work began decades ago only to be abandoned before completion.

On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a hearing on challenges to the reinstatement of construction permits for one such project. It involves permits granted to the Tennessee Valley Authority to build the Bellefonte nuclear reactors, two reactors that were started near Hollywood, Ala., in 1974 but never finished.

The permits were surrendered in 2006, but reinstated last year by the NRC after a request from the TVA. In January of this year, the commission moved the Bellefonte site to “deferred” status, from “terminated,” taking the TVA one step closer to resuming construction. The TVA would still need to give the NRC 120 days’ notice before any construction begins.

The challenges to the new permitting came from the Southern Alliance on Clean Energy and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL). They filed nine separate “contentions,” generally arguing that permits initially granted in 1974 should not simply be re-approved without thoroughly reanalyzing the site’s and design’s safety, and health and environmental issues.

Lou Zeller, science director for the BREDL, said his group’s opposition comes not only from the procedural questions raised by the reinstatement of expired permits but from questions about the reactors themselves.

“The construction there was abandoned for a period of time, and it would be unsafe to complete them. As unsafe as it could be,” he said.

Last summer, a cable supporting the containment structure at the Bellefonte snapped, an incident that the BREDL and other opponents point to as evidence that the aging structure should not be completed. “Rust never sleeps,” Zeller said.

Huge Sunk Costs

Construction at the Bellefonte site began the year the permits were granted, 1974. By 1988, one part of the two-unit reactor was 88 percent completed, and the other stood at 58 percent. In spite of the apparently close-to-completion status, construction stopped that year after $6 billion had been spent.

Only after the spike in oil prices earlier this decade and the recent renewed interest in nuclear power did the TVA renew its intention to complete the station.

It might seem strange to abandon a multi-billion dollar investment, but Bellefonte was far from the only nuclear project to end up on the scrap heap. More than 60 proposed projects were scrapped in the 1970s and early 1980s as the energy environment changed and oil became cheaply available. The 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown added public fears about nuclear safety to the mix.

Some of those sites, like the Midland Cogeneration Venture in Midland, Mich., were converted to other forms of power generation (natural gas, in Midland’s case) due to overwhelming costs of nuclear construction. Others, such as the Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant in Mississippi, were transformed for other uses; at Yellow Creek, construction continued through part of 1993 to make the site a NASA solid rocket motor construction plant, but that, too, was eventually halted. Many of the failed nuclear reactors were simply abandoned or demolished.