25 years ago I moved to northern Alabama and for all of that time I have been driving by the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant near Hollywood, Alabama, and wishing that I could go and get a closer look at it. Well, on the morning of March 4th, a quarter-century of wishing finally came to pass. I owe it all to some friends at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built and maintains the plant.

Construction on this plant began in 1975 when I was in diapers, and here I was, a half-century later, gazing upon what these craftsmen had managed to build over the next 13 years. For two hours that morning, we got to crawl all over the plant in a way that would simply not be possible in an operating nuclear plant, or even in one that had once operated. We would have to have had special training and dosimetry and all kinds of protective aspects. But at Bellefonte, none of that was necessary for a simple reason: the plant has never been completed and has never operated. There’s no steam driving thru the pipes; there’s no fuel in the core; there’s no water cooling in the huge towers. Bellefonte has just never operated.

Now TVA has done some interesting things with reactors that were in a state of (shall we say?) “indecision” in the past. The Browns Ferry reactors that are twenty miles west of me were shut down for many years in the 1980s and were brought back online. The Watts Bar 2 reactor in Tennessee was finished and brought to operation from 2007 to 2016, decades after its construction was suspended in 1985. So the question has hung over Bellefonte for many decades now here in northern Alabama: will we ever finish it?

In my considered opinion, no, we won’t. The Bellefonte reactors are of a design that is no longer supported by the original manufacturer (Babcock&Wilcox) and to complete them would require a huge design effort that would be better spent on newer, more promising designs. Like the liquid-fluoride reactors we’re pursuing. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but I don’t think the existing Bellefonte reactors will ever come to operation, and indeed, all of the structure built for them will likely need to be torn down at some point in the future.

But I must admit, the entire thing is awe-inspiring. They are so incredibly big. Everything is just on a scale that seems to dwarf your imagination. From the cooling towers to the turbines, from the fuel pools to the steam generators, it is just so difficult to convey to someone who hasn’t seen it, just how BIG everything associated with this plant really is.

Our tour began at the two huge cooling towers that are first thing you see from the highway as you approach the plant. They have the classic hyperbolic shape that has come to be the visual icon of nuclear power ever since the Three Mile Island-2 incident in 1979. (there’s a lot of reasons why this shouldn’t be the case, but I digress) I had never been up-close-and-personal with a finished cooling tower before. I have spent a lot of time at the unfinished cooling tower at Yellow Creek and wondered what it was supposed to look like if it had been completed. At Bellefonte, I found out. There’s a giant pool of water at ground level at the tower, and we climbed up concrete stairs that seemed to float in the sky to reach an internal level of the cooling tower that helped me to understand how it worked. There were acres of some kind of plates or baffles in there that were meant to direct moisture droplets downward to that giant pool. Concrete pillars held the entire structure aloft at least a hundred feet up, and the stairs in the sky were how we reached it. But I was dismayed to learn that if the cooling tower would ever be brought to operational status, that all of those acres of baffles and piping would have to be replaced.