Alabama Nuclear Reactor, Partly Built, to Be Finished

The directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority unanimously approved a plan on Thursday to finish the partly built Bellefonte 1 nuclear reactor, a project on which the authority spent billions of dollars in the 1970s and ’80s but dropped in 1988 because of cost overruns and declining estimates of power demand.

The revived reactor, in Hollywood, Ala., is not expected to be completed before 2018 to 2020 — or about a half-century after the project was first announced, and following nearly a quarter-century of limbo.

“The T.V.A, has wrestled with the fate of Bellefonte since 1988,” said Marilyn A. Brown, a board member who is a professor of energy policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy. The decision comes at a time when other countries, Germany and Switzerland, for example, are leaning away from nuclear power and closing older plants, after the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex in Japan in March.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/science/earth/19nuclear.html

bunch of fucking idiots on that board, I took the liberty to add a new meaning to what you said.
The last thing we need is more nuclear power plant, now or ever. I suspect this is going to be dropped before its finished with ratepayers taking the brunt of the cost.

then rebuilt from scratch. Betcha' it's not going to cost a penny less than $12 billion.

How many solar panels and windmills can you buy with $12 billion? How many jobs would be created for manufacturers and installers? How much should be spent on developing the "smart grid" for the entire TVA service area? I could go on for days with all the (better) alternative ways to spend this money.

Solar is way beyond being economically competitive with the TRUE cost of nuclear right now, wind costs about 25%.

Put some carpenters to work.

:sarcasm:

Oh, there will be some incremental improvements in some key areas and they obviously don't need to install decades-old computers (etc), but the basic design needs to fit the structure that's already there.

Note that they're finishing up a similar project at their Watts Bar facility in the next year or two.

"They want to put the plumbing right through the core".

Civilian scientists and engineers can imagine enough ways to fuck up a nuclear plant.

they should finish this old reactor and then never turn it on...
instead they can use it like the fire department uses special training buildings...

to train telerobotic operators how to use nuke filth cleanup high tech equipment
to train local mayors and citizens groups how to turn over their neighbourhood topsoil
to train the local fire department how not to get lethal doses and die within 14 days of the disaster
to train the power company to give tours to the locals to win over support other than through deceptive lies at local town halls
to teach the local concrete suppliers how to actual build the required sarcophogae
to run practise fire drills of 95% evacuations within 5 hours to the local populus

they can have a full, to-scale practise disaster park... this would be a real boon to the economy there
and once everybody is totally cool with routine, they can just turn it on and wait...

for the inevitable.

Not much training value.