Bellefonte: “We're excited. It's been a long time coming.”

The suspense and tension are over:

After hearing about 70 speakers support or oppose nuclear power and the completion of the half-finished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant, the TVA board voted unanimously on Thursday to restart construction.

So it wasn’t even a near thing. But that meeting sounds like it was pretty interesting. The local paper, The Scottsboro (Ala.) Daily Sentinel, sent writer Ken Bonner over to take a listen:

"We're very excited to see it," Jackson County Economic Development Authority President and CEO, Goodrich "Dus" Rogers said. "Now we move into a capitalized project rather than one just in the planning stages."

Rogers, and a group of 26 other people from northeast Alabama who attended the meeting were excited with the outcome. The contingent included 22 people from Jackson County including governmental, business and civic leaders, four from Fort Payne and Guntersville Mayor Bob Hembree.

Jackson County is home to Bellefonte and Scottsboro. Surely, Scottsboro doesn’t want it.

“I'm very happy that this project has finally come to fruition," Scottsboro Mayor Melton Potter said.

Oh.

“A 9-0 vote is a pretty bold statement by that board. It shows they are all on the same page and are unified in doing what is best for the entire service region," Potter added.

But it wasn’t a complete love feast.

"You can say clean and safe, clean and safe and clean and safe and it's never ever going to be the truth," Anna Haislip of Nashville said through tears.

Almost every story I’ve read about this meeting references Ms. Haislip, apparently an area grandmother. My rule of thumb is to let elders talk at length and about whatever they want – while I listen without interruption or critique – but Ms. Haislip is apparently a very effective advocate for her position. Condescension unappreciated.

But Ms. Haislip has the benefit of having no agenda aside from her own, while anti-nuclear advocates are rather intractably wedded – or is that welded – in place. So the comments from area residents were far more interesting - and virtually all in favor of the plant.

"We're excited. It's been a long time coming," Rick Roden, President and CEO of the Greater Jackson County Chamber of Commerce said. "It means great days for all the people of Jackson County. We expect to see a lot of growth as a result of the vote."

Expectations are high. Industrial, retail and commercial prospects have enquired about locating locally. The anticipation is that the area will get spin off businesses to support the TVA project and will experience rapid growth similar to what occurred in Dayton, Tenn. and the surrounding area when the Unit 2 project began at Watts Bar.

I’ve read that Northern Alabama has about 13 percent unemployment, so even though Bellefonte isn’t expected to go online until about 2018 – there will be about 2800 construction jobs in the interim - ancillary business’ are ready to go. We shouldn’t underestimate what an economic bonanza such a large industrial project represents for its community – it’s not crass, it’s just the way of it in a capitalist system.

Bonner does a terrific job capturing the excitement Bellefonte brings to Scottsboro and Jackson County. Worth a read if your in the mood for a very happy nuclear energy story.

Bellefonte.

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog