Son: How often will we pay for a nuclear power plant in Bellefonte that is not yet working?

Almost five years ago we wrote on this page: “It is really numbing to understand the enormous waste of [electricity] Interest and taxpayers’ money that was lost when setting up, building, scrapping, rebuilding and leaving the Bellefonte nuclear power plant. “

Today we can add something. It is truly amazing to understand the enormous waste of TVA interest and tax money put up, built, scrapped, rebuilt, abandoned, sold, almost sold and now going to court to defend that Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant is not sold.

According to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is based entirely on construction costs, we’ve had between $ 5 billion and $ 6 billion since 1970, when the federal utility announced the facility and four years later began work on an absolutely gorgeous 1,600-acre property to the north US dollars are spent in Alabama between Highway 72 and the Tennessee River in Jackson County.

However, five congressmen wrote in 2018 that the total cost of TVA in Bellefonte was $ 9 billion. Hey, what’s a billion here and a billion there? These congressmen – four from Alabama and our own Tennessee MP Chuck Fleischmann – asked in a letter to the US Department of Energy from Donald Trump that DOE is actually making us taxpayers and interest payers pay back for the facility.

This time, they wanted us to subsidize the privatization of Bellefonte and its nuclear power by billionaire developer and financier Franklin L. Haney in Chattanooga with government-backed loans of $ 6 billion and manufacturing tax credits of $ 2 billion. In other words, Haney would use our money to get into the nuclear business.

For starters, the mere fact that TVA ever put up a “For Sale” sign in 2016 saying a minimum bid of $ 36.4 million – with an M – minimum bid for the nearly $ 9 billion closed – should be with a B – Bellefonte and its huge acreage seeks, in our view, to be seen as grounds for a sham criminal case.

But right now the only trial is a civil trial in a Huntsville federal courtroom. The crucial question is whether Haney, who quickly offered $ 111 million in 2016, will receive this property or whether TVA will keep it after canceling the sale in 2018.

And it’s complicated. Haney’s nuclear team, Nuclear Development LLC, failed to finalize an estimated $ 13 billion closing plan that could convince the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to transfer the license to build nuclear power plants to TVA by the two-year sale to be approved by TVA.

“Our position from the start has been that Nuclear Development did not receive the construction permit transfer from the NRC and therefore did not meet the legal requirements to complete the sale because the NRC required this permit transfer,” said TVA President Jeff Lyash the Times Free Press in a recent interview. “We did not properly complete the sale and now that contract has expired.”

The employee file photo of Dan Henry / Franklin Haney, who owns Nuclear Development, LLC. Representing, bids against Aaron Abadi, CEO of the National Environmental Group that represents Jackson Holdings, during an auction of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Hollywood, Alabama. on November 14, 2016. Haney won the auction with a bid of $ 111 million.

Haney’s attorneys counter that TVA did not offer the “appropriate collaboration” with Haney’s new company, which was required in the original 2016 sales agreement.

This case is a “simple breach of contract,” said Caine O’Rear III, an attorney for Haney’s company.

The Huntsville court judge has indicated that the case is tarnished by an alleged dispute over how and to whom Haney’s company could sell future Bellefonte power. In statements of the purchase, Haney and TVA stated that the electricity would be sold to TVA for resale. But Haney’s hiring, former TVA chief operating officer Bill McCollum, at a meeting with representatives from Memphis Light Gas & Water, told the city utility company to buy its power from Bellefonte or other suppliers, not TVA.

Did we mention that the Memphis utility is TVA’s biggest customer?

Former TVA President Bill Johnson, who had decided not to grant Haney a second extension of the purchase agreement, said he was irritated by McCollum’s comments on Memphis. However, Johnson said he terminated the sale agreement with Haney in the fall of 2018 because he was unsure whether Nuclear Development could ever get NRC approval to take over the unfinished facility in order not to stifle potential competition from Nuclear Development or his Blocking efforts urge Memphis to part ways with TVA.

But eccentric 80-year-old Haney, once a door-to-door Bible seller and always a non-partisan, high-spending political donor, does not meekly leave. For decades, he has made a handsome penny from the government building or buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of buildings that he previously used as a government landlord. It also owns one of the largest private toll roads in the country. And now he has a new goal.

For the past decade, he has worked to position himself as the first private individual to own and operate a commercial nuclear power plant in America.

And why not? There are billions of dollars in tax credits and loan guarantees out there, and he’s asked everyone for help to get some of it – from those five Congressmen to Donald Trump to Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen and Qatari foreign investors from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other major news organizations.

We all have to hope and pray that TVA is stuck with this mothballed plant and its land.

If nothing else, all these mornings would result in a beautiful solar and wind farm. Gosh, that should kindle some electricity in the age of climate change. And it can’t possibly cost us more than pay for Haney’s newest wildhair venture.

Staff photo of Technician Erin O. Smith / David Wayne talks about various aspects of the control room at the unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in July 2018 in Hollywood, Alabama.