A couple of months ago, I felt like a nuclear “Indiana Jones” when a trip out to Iuka, Mississippi took me face-to-face with the ruins of a nuclear reactor. Or maybe it was more like an episode of “LOST” where they find a four-toed statue. But there I was looking at a huge, unfinished cooling tower, a turbine hall that looked pretty well completed but abandoned, and a containment dome whose rebar had been completely overgrown by vegetation.

Further investigation led me to discover that this was once TVA’s Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant, begun in 1978 and shut down in 1984 after the expenditure of billions of dollars. Yellow Creek never made a watt of power, but its shutdown broke the hearts of the local community, who had thought that the coming of the reactor would lead to an improvement in the local economy. Later efforts by NASA to build solid-rocket boosters at the site in the late 1980s also led to hope that was dashed a few years later when the effort was cancelled.

All of this got me curious about what TVA planned to do with nuclear power back in the early 1980s. And what I found out got me excited:

It looked like TVA planned to replace their coal plants with nuclear plants.

TVA had a very ambitious nuclear construction schedule underway in the late 1970s, and they had stopped building coal plants altogether. Here were the plants they planned to build:

Browns Ferry 1, 2, 3
Sequoyah 1 and 2
Watts Bar 1 and 2
Bellefonte 1 and 2
Yellow Creek 1 and 2
Phipps Bend 1 and 2
Hartsville 1, 2, 3, 4

The ones in blue are reactors that ended up getting built and operated.

The ones in green are under currently under construction.

The ones in red were cancelled. Mostly in 1984 but some in the years to follow.

I began to wonder what TVA would have been like if they had built these reactors. Then I correlated which coal plants they might have been able to shut down if they had gone ahead and built the reactors.

If they would have built Yellow Creek 1 and 2 they would have replaced the Colbert coal plant (1198 MWe, finished 1965) and the Allen coal plant (753 MWe, finished 1959). Colbert consumes 8,900 tons of coal per day and Allen consumes 7,200 tons per day.

If the Bellefonte 1 and 2 reactors were completed they would have been able to shut down the Widows Creek coal plant (1629 MWe, finished 1965). Widows Creek consumes 10,000 tons of coal per day and was the site of a gypsum leak in January.

If the Watts Bar 2 reactor had been completed it would have replaced most of the power generation of the infamous Kingston coal plant (1456 MWe, finished 1955). Kingston consumes 14,000 tons of coal per day and was the site of a huge coal ash spill on December 22, 2008.

The Phipps Bend 1 and 2 reactors would have replaced the Bull Run coal plant (870 MWe, finished 1967), the John Sevier coal plant (712 MWe, finished 1957) and the rest of Kingston. John Sevier is now targeted for shutdown and replacement by a natural-gas-fired plant because of a judicial judgement against the emissions at John Sevier. Bull Run consumes 7,300 tons of coal per day and John Sevier consumes 5,700 tons/day.

The huge Hartsville complex (4 reactors) would have replaced Gallatin (988 MWe, finished 1959), Shawnee (1369 MWe, finished 1957), and Johnsonville (1254 MWe, finished 1952). Gallatin consumes 12,350 tons/day, Shawnee consumes 9,600 tons/day, and Johnsonville consumes 9,600 tons/day. Building Hartsville would have made an incredible difference in TVA’s future.

This would have left Cumberland (2530 MWe, finished 1973) and Paradise (2273 MWe, finished 1970) as the only coal plants on the TVA grid, and it’s likely at some point these would have been replaced with nuclear too.

Grand total: 85,000 tons of coal each day that TVA wouldn’t be burning.

Now, I read an article today called “A new TVA energy strategy” that says that TVA should avoid nuclear power and focus on renewables. Well, I’ve got news for the author–TVA hasn’t built a coal or nuclear plant in 25 years and HAS been focused on renewables for 15 years now, and they haven’t shut down a coal plant yet!

It may be too late to finish Hartsville, Phipps Bend, or Yellow Creek, but it isn’t too late for TVA to continue to push hard on the nuclear option–not only light-water reactors, but on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors that can potentially be sited at the same locations as the existing coal plants and take over their generation duties.