Nuclear Power Plant in Tennessee Is Fueling a Debate Over Safety : Electricity: Operator seeks to fire up facility, but critics say it has major problems. TVA customers fear rate hikes.

In 1972, when Tennessee Valley Authority executives broke ground on a nuclear plant in this scenic corner of Appalachia, they promised that it would provide a quick, cheap and safe means of meeting the power requirements of the surrounding population, which they projected would burgeon.

On almost all counts, they were wrong.

Far from speedy, construction of the Watts Bar 1 facility, completed a month ago, took 23 years. At $7 billion, the price tag for the 1,218-megawatt plant exceeds initial estimates by more than a dozen times and is 10 times higher than comparably sized plants elsewhere in the United States.

Instead of growing, the area’s population is declining, according to the latest census reports, raising questions about whether the facility is needed at all.

TVA, one of the nation’s larger suppliers of electricity, is nonetheless proceeding with plans to fire up the plant. In November, after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave TVA officials a green light to start low-level operations, they began loading fuel and requested permission to bring the plant up to full power by January.

“We need it to assure our customers a steady supply of power,” said Ike Zeringue, a TVA vice president. The plant will provide power to 250,000 homes in the region, he said.

Watts Bar, the last nuclear facility in the nation being considered by federal authorities for licensing, typifies the problems facing the industry nationwide.

In the last 10 years, two dozen plants around the country have been mothballed or dismantled. Of the 109 plants in operation, many are forced to run at minimal capacity. No new plants have been ordered since 1978.

“Like nuke plants all over, Watts Bar is clearly more expensive and more risky than almost any other energy producer,” said Jim Riccio, a nuclear power expert at Public Citizen, a consumer group. “On the other hand, the industry is loath to give up the investments they have made in plants.”

Although the cost of construction and delays at Watts Bar have marred the plant’s image, those problems are dwarfed in importance by major safety issues at the plant, according to critics.

Over the last decade, NRC inspectors have uncovered dozens of irregularities in the plant’s safety system, ranging from a quality-assurance inspection program that was not up to par to false information in safety reports prepared by senior managers. During one routine inspection, an NRC inspector discovered frogs in a pipe.

In one recent report, NRC officials said they found a host of safety problems, including safety cables sitting in flooded manholes, six drain lines for cooling the unit’s eight emergency-reactor pumps arranged so that they could freeze, and several poorly insulated electric wires.

In 1980, work at Watts Bar was halted for five years after workers cited 6,000 safety complaints at the plant. Since then, a steady stream of whistle-blowers has reported dozens of flaws and safety concerns.

Critics say the list of complaints points to fundamental structural problems. Idle for the most part since the early 1980s, Watts Bar’s systems are too outdated to be secure, they contend. “That plant is clearly not safe, and the managers are not taking the required steps to make it safe,” said Ann Harris, a former supervisor and outspoken critic of Watts Bar.

“This is another Three Mile Island waiting to happen,” added Harris, a member of We the People Inc., a national organization of nuclear whistle-blowers.

Zeringue said TVA has addressed all of the plant’s past safety concerns. Officials spent 1 million man-hours reviewing the plant’s design, he said, and replaced up to 3 million feet of cable, 8,000 pipe supports and 25,000 conduit supports. Finally, they performed 27,000 tests to make sure that the systems were working well.

“We have thoroughly proved that the equipment at the plant functions properly and smoothly,” he said.

But the plant’s critics are not convinced. Nuclear activists from Greenpeace, Earth First! and other environmental groups have stepped up opposition to the plant in recent weeks.

Recently, TVA dropped efforts to inspect all of the plant’s safety systems in favor of a “random-sampling” program in which only 10% of the systems are inspected, said Fred McCustion, a retired Watts Bar quality-assurance manager. “To me, that indicates that they are not serious about the safety at the plant,” he said.

Area residents also fear that TVA eventually will double or triple their electric bills to cover the cost of building and operating the Watts Bar plant. In a November report, the General Accounting Office said TVA will be unable to sustain operations at Watts Bar without raising the rate base.

TVA has $28 billion in assets, 70% of which are in nuclear-related facilities, even though nuclear-power plants only generate 14% of its electricity, GAO said.

“TVA has no one to pass those high costs onto but us,” said Harris, who lives eight miles from the plant. “But folks around here can’t afford them.”