The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) can be totally justified in renaming its Browns Ferry Unit 1 nuclear energy plant the “Phoenix” energy plant. Not for geographic causes (the plant is positioned in Alabama, not Arizona). Fairly, the identify can be an applicable nod to the mythological Egyptian hen that repeatedly dies in hearth and is reborn from ashes to overcome the sky. The 1,200-MW Normal Electrical boiling water reactor powering the unit has twice crashed in ashes—first actually after which figuratively—throughout its 40-year historical past, and been reborn. It has earned its title as the final word comeback reactor.
What’s Previous Is New Once more
The most recent return of Browns Ferry Unit 1 to service this yr outcomes from an enormous upgrading and restart of an present reactor—one which had not run since 1985, when a regulatory shutdown of TVA’s total five-reactor fleet idled this aged unit. Through the years, TVA returned the 2 youthful Browns Ferry boilers and the 2 Sequoyah Westinghouse pressurized water reactor (PWR) items to service. Lastly, it commissioned the Watts Bar Unit 1 PWR plant in 1996.
The Watts Bar start-up marked the final commissioning of a brand new nuclear plant within the U.S., emptying the nuclear building pipeline that started to dry up within the mid-Nineteen Seventies.
However Browns Ferry Unit 1 (Determine 1) remained in stasis. Not useless, however in a deep administrative coma.
In 2002, TVA determined that, given present and anticipated load development, it wanted to get the nuclear unit again in service. Restarting (and massively refurbishing) the aged nuke, the TVA board concluded, was less expensive general than constructing new technology. 5 years and $1.8 billion later, the geriatric plant is up and working once more, flexing its upgraded muscle tissue and looking out very very similar to a brand new unit.
The U.S. nuclear trade, all the time placing an optimistic face on its long-lasting exile from the producing market, has billed the Browns Ferry restart as the primary new nuclear plant of the twenty first century. That’s comprehensible hyperbole, however not totally correct. TVA first broke floor on Browns Ferry in 1967. The plant that went again into service in 40 years later in 2007 absolutely isn’t the identical one which began producing electrical energy within the early Nineteen Seventies.
Browns Ferry Unit 1 isn’t the primary U.S. unit of the twenty first century; it’s the final unit of the twentieth century—after being one of many first.
Unit 1’s Storied Historical past
The historical past of Browns Ferry Unit 1 illustrates the complexities of nuclear energy economics and politics and the futility of constructing broad futuristic claims primarily based on restricted knowledge. That the plant exists in any respect as we speak is outstanding. It’s a testomony to the basic GE design and the fashionable administration of TVA. It’s also a reminder of TVA’s earlier historical past and its longest-serving, autocratic chief, Aubrey “Pink” Wagner, who ran the federal energy company from 1961 to 1978 (Determine 2).
No person in America within the Sixties was extra enthusiastic in regards to the promise of nuclear energy than Wisconsin farm boy Pink Wagner. A civil engineer skilled on the College of Wisconsin, he joined TVA in 1934, shortly after its beginning by the hands of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political midwifery. Roosevelt, as governor of New York, had beforehand created the Energy Authority of the State of New York, which turned the TVA prototype.
A proficient engineer, Wagner rose by way of TVA ranks. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy named Wagner to go the regional energy and financial improvement company. By 1965, Wagner had concluded that nuclear energy was the way forward for electrical technology, significantly for the TVA area. He had moved the TVA system away from the hydropower sources that had fashioned its producing foundation on the Tennessee River towards the plentiful coal sources within the area—a recognition that hydro had nearly used up its potential within the area.
However Wagner didn’t need to be susceptible to unstable coal costs and the chances of air air pollution management prices. TVA was the most important utility client of coal within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. For greater than a decade it fought federal air air pollution management laws, arguing that, as a federal authorities company, it was exempt from the Clear Air Act governing different mills. Even TVA legal professionals didn’t actually imagine that argument, although they argued it in federal courts. They in the end misplaced.
Nuclear reactors promised a producing expertise detached to gas costs and with no emissions of sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen; Wagner was offered. A TVA biographer precisely mentioned of Wagner, “He oversaw the development of the company’s final dams and its first nuclear reactors.”
Nuclear reactor salesmen regarded Wagner as a simple mark. Considered one of them advised me the Nineteen Eighties, “You might pitch a brand new nuclear expertise at Pink and after a hour, he’d say, ‘I’ll take two items.’ ” Certainly, at one level, TVA agreed to purchase 17 nuclear items—together with boiling water reactors (BWRs), pressurized water reactors, and high-temperature gas-cooled reactors—from 5 totally different distributors.
Finally, after expenditures of billions of {dollars}, 5 items acquired constructed: three BWRs, together with Browns Ferry Unit 1, and two PWRs at Sequoyah. A last PWR went into service at Watts Bar in 1996. The TVA board voted this yr to renew building on a second Watts Bar unit that’s been mothballed for greater than a decade. When Watts Bar Unit 2 is accomplished, it should supplant Browns Ferry Unit 1 as the ultimate nuclear plant of the twentieth century (Determine 3).
The Final Shall Be First
Browns Ferry was TVA’s first nuclear unit; the reactor order was positioned in 1966. The Atomic Vitality Fee—inside a decade to be eviscerated by creation of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Fee (NRC)—licensed the plant to function in 1973, close to Decatur, Ala., at a spot that was traditionally a widely known ford of the Tennessee River, broadly commemorated in people songs.
In truth, these strains from a standard Alabama blues tune (creator unknown) ring true for the nuclear plant as effectively: Laborious luck poppa standing within the rain/If the world was corn he couldn’t purchase grain/Lord Lord acquired these Brown’s Ferry Blues.
The primary Browns Ferry unit entered industrial service on August 1, 1974. It was at the moment the world’s largest nuclear energy plant. The 1,200-MW GE boiler with a Mark 1 “donut and lightbulb” containment construction was additionally decidedly cutting-edge.
The 2 GE BWRs that adopted on the website have been additionally state-of-the-art reactors, with upgraded pressure-suppression containments. Items 2 and three, as of March 1, 1975, and March 1, 1977, made Browns Ferry by far the most important nuclear energy station on the planet on the time. (Japan now has the most important nuclear station at Tokyo Electrical Energy Co.’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa station. Its seven items produce 8,200 MW of electrical energy.)
When the primary Browns Ferry unit went into service, mentioned a report by the Union of Involved Scientists, “The few dozen working nuclear energy crops within the U.S. produced barely extra vitality than the nation derived from firewood.”
Lacking Fireplace-Stops
Regardless of its promise and preliminary high quality efficiency, Browns Ferry Unit 1 had some vital security vulnerabilities that have been unanticipated by the trade, the utility, or the newly created NRC. These have been the early days of nuclear regulation, earlier than regulators acknowledged the complete complexities of nuclear technology.
One unexpected vulnerability was hearth. On March 22, 1975, throughout a plant modification, as Unit 1 was in its seventh month of profitable operation and Unit 2 had simply begun industrial operation, two employees have been making an attempt to detect air leaks the place electrical management cables have been getting into the Unit 1 reactor constructing. The employees, apparently uninstructed by their supervisors, have been utilizing candles to seek out air leaks the place the cables entered the reactor constructing wall. This was, it turned out, equal to utilizing cigarette lighters to discover a pure fuel leak.
The bodily outcomes of holding candles within the nuke weren’t as explosive as searching for a fuel leak with an open flame, however they have been no less than as economically catastrophic. The flames ignited polyurethane foam insulation within the cable penetrations. Then the plant actually went up in flames. Unexpectedly, the hearth unfold rapidly and rendered the plant’s main security tools ineffective. The emergency core cooling system, anticipated to be the chief line of protection in a reactor accident, couldn’t perform.
Fortuitously, level-headed plant operators have been ready to make use of different, handbook programs to get the reactor cooling course of beneath management because the plant went out of service. It took a yr to restore the harm and convey the plant again to the place it may generate energy.
The fireplace rapidly fueled the U.S. antinuclear motion, which had been smoldering for a while. Not lengthy after the hearth, which made the entrance pages of the nation’s newspapers and the nightly information broadcasts of the three nationwide tv networks, many critics have been questioning whether or not nuclear energy was a sensible funding.
Whereas typical knowledge says the March 29, 1979, loss-of-coolant accident and nuclear gas meltdown on the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant pulled the set off on the top of the Nineteen Seventies nuclear energy growth, a extra nuanced evaluation means that it might need been the Browns Ferry hearth.
A Signal of Future Progress?
TVA completed a serious feat in turning a considerably rudimentary, albeit essentially sturdy, early Nineteen Seventies nuclear producing plant into a contemporary machine. It’s twentieth to twenty first century, analog to digital, primitive to trendy. To this point, the plant is working with impeccable efficiency charactistics, and there’s no purpose to suspect it received’t proceed to behave effectively.
Will the return of Browns Ferry Unit 1 final Might mark the start of the U.S. trade’s long-anticipated renaissance for nuclear energy? That’s not but discernable. The query might not be answerable. The Nuclear Vitality Institute (NEI) and different nuclear trade pursuits clearly have their glowing fingers crossed in hopes that this restart would be the harbinger of extra, and far newer, nuclear crops.
Skip Bowman, a retired nuclear Navy admiral, now heads the NEI, the trade’s Washington foyer. (Is it attainable to run the NEI with out having been a nuclear Navy veteran?) Bowman mentioned in a written assertion, “We imagine this challenge will mark the start of nuclear vitality’s rejuvenation in the US.” He added the most recent speaking level of nuclear technology advocates: Nuclear energy crops “provide greater than 70% of all U.S. electrical energy that comes from sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases or any of the pollution coated by the Clear Air Act.” Nevertheless, nukes present solely about 20% of U.S. electrical energy technology. Coal continues to be king, and prone to stay so for a very long time.
Bucking the Development
The report reveals that no nuclear crops ordered within the U.S. after 1974 acquired constructed and that there have been no new plant orders previous to March 1979, the time of the TMI meltdown. That was most likely a perform of economics: The U.S. entered at extended interval of “stagflation,” a mixture of low financial development and excessive inflation, within the early Nineteen Seventies. New nukes went into slow-motion loss of life, lengthy earlier than anti-nuke protesters began marching and complaining. By the late Nineteen Seventies, nuclear plant builders have been taking out building loans with rates of interest in extra of 20% per yr with a purpose to end their crops.
Nor did the U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors have a very good operational report. In 1985, beneath intense political stress from Congress and the NRC, TVA voluntarily shut down its total nuclear fleet. Partially as a result of TVA was a federal company and simply subjected to scrutiny, TVA’s crops turned the poster fleet for poor nuclear efficiency and an off-the-cuff angle towards security.
By 1985 new orders had dried up. U.S. crops ran at low ranges of reliability and capability. Operation and upkeep prices have been excessive. The credibility of the nuclear trade was within the radioactive rest room.
That quickly modified—beneath the management of Duke Energy’s charismatic CEO, the late Invoice Lee—following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear energy plant explosion in Ukraine. The trade devoted itself to improved efficiency and security. Underneath Lee’s prodding, the trade reversed its course, pledging productiveness and high quality efficiency at its crops and creating trade establishments to make sure high quality.
Over the following decade, the trade delivered. Plant capability elements elevated considerably; scrams (involuntary reactor shutdowns) decreased. The nation’s nuclear fleet turned a stellar performer.
That trade reversal led on to the restart of Browns Ferry Unit 1, because the TVA board accepted the interior criticism and made its resolution to restart the long-idled plant and to satisfy and exceed the trade’s new targets for high quality and security.
The consequence: one other rebirth of Browns Ferry Unit 1. Name it “Phoenix.” F. Scott Fitzgerald was fallacious when he mentioned, “There aren’t any second acts in American lives.” Browns Ferry Unit 1 is in its third act, and is wanting spry.
—Kennedy Maize is a veteran vitality journalist and long-time contributor to POWER journal.
