TVA's Nuclear Vision: In with the New, Out with the Old

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Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The Tennessee Valley Authority (NYSE:TVE) (TVA) (Knoxville, Tennessee) filed an Early Site Permit application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (Bethesda, Maryland) to assess the suitability of building small modular reactors (SMRs) at its Clinch River site in northeastern Tennessee. Later this month the NRC is expected to decide whether TVA's 8,800-page application, filed in May, is complete, according to Scott Burnell, an NRC spokesman.

If TVA's application is deemed complete, "we think we can get through the technical analysis [of the site] in about three years," Burnell told Industrial Info. This is the first site license filing with the NRC that involves SMRs. TVA's early site permit application focused on the site safety and environmental and emergency preparedness requirements for potential construction of up to 800 megawatts (MW) of SMRs on the site where the Clinch River Breeder Reactor was shut down by Congress in the early 1980s.

The timeline on certifying TVA's site could go beyond three years if the agency decides to hold public hearings on the application, Burnell said in an interview. The NRC's Atomic Safety & Licensing Board will decide whether public hearings are required as part of the site-licensing process, he added.

SMRs potentially offer utilities an opportunity to add baseload, carbon-free electric generating capacity in increments as small as 50 MW.

Construction of SMRs is not expected to begin until well into the 2020s because no SMR reactor design has been certified by the NRC. A few years ago, Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises Incorporated (NYSE:BW) (B&W) (Charlotte, North Carolina) was aggressively pursuing an SMR reactor design, but lack of investor interest caused the company to slow development of its mPower reactor design in early 2014, a little over a year after receiving a $225 million SMR development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) (Washington, D.C.). For more on that award, see January 14, 2013, article -- Babcock & Wilcox Team Wins DoE Grant to Develop Small Modular Reactor.

That appears to leave NuScale Power LLC (Portland, Oregon) in the lead to certify an SMR design. The NRC expects to receive a reactor design certification application from NuScale's team in late 2016, Burnell said, and it may take the agency as long as five years to assess the design. The NuScale consortium won a second SMR grant, worth $226 million, from DoE in December 2013. For more on that award, see April 14, 2014, article -- Large DoE Grant Supports Development of Very Small Nuclear Reactors. NuScale's team is developing a design for a 50-MW SMR. B&W's mPower SMR design is for a 180-MW reactor.

TVA is seeking NRC approval to build up to 800 MW of next-generation nuclear reactors at its Clinch River site, but plans to build one unit first to test the concept and the economics, TVA spokesman Jim Hopson told Industrial Info. "We have a responsibility to pursue technological innovations that could benefit our customers," he added. Having an upper bound of 800 MW gives the agency flexibility to build several reactors at Clinch River, depending on which reactor design TVA chooses.

Since the NRC has not certified an SMR reactor design, TVA was forced to apply for an early site permit rather than a combined construction and operating license (COL), Hopson said. A COL would only be appropriate for siting a reactor whose design has been certified by the NRC. "Our application is for a generic plant envelope that is not connected to a specific nuclear technology," he added.

While TVA is taking its first steps toward advanced nuclear generation, it is also trying to dispose of some old nuclear technology. At its May board of director's meeting, the agency decided to auction off its Bellefonte Generating Station property, about 1,600 acres of land located in northern Alabama. TVA started building two nuclear units on that site, but never finished either. One of the partially built units is said to be about 90% complete while the other is about 55% finished. The agency reportedly spent between $4 billion and $6 billion to build the Bellefonte units before ceasing construction in 1988. The value of the Bellefonte site is said to be assessed at about $36.4 million. TVA currently is developing criteria to auction off the property, Hopson said. The agency expects to have auction criteria sometime later this year. TVA already rejected one early bid, a $38 million offer from Phoenix Energy of Nevada LLC (Carson City, Nevada), because the agency had not finished developing its bidding process, he added. The bidding process is expected to have a minimum bid, and nothing will preclude the new owner of the Bellefonte property from finishing the nuclear units, Hopson told Industrial Info. "One requirement is that any new owner will have to repurpose the land for the benefit of people living in our service area," he added.

"People have talked about the potential of SMRs for years, but TVA is to be commended for taking the first step to site this next-generation nuclear technology," commented Britt Burt, Industrial Info's vice president of research for the global Power Industry. "That said, there are years of hard analytic and engineering work that needs to get done before construction of an SMR could begin."

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