FUTURE RIVER FEST, SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, CHATTANOOGA--RENAISSANCE PARK

                         Click on image for an expanded view.

The Sunshines on Nuclear Issues-BREDL, BEST/MATRR Press Conference at TVA-Chattanooga, Tn.

The Bellefonte Efficiency & Sustainability Team/Mothers Against Tennessee River Radiation (BEST/MATRR), Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL)  Press Conference in Chattanooga, Tn.

BREDL TVA July 20, 2011 from Chris Braly on Vimeo.

Letter to TVA Board & CEO Tom Kilgore, click on image for an expanded view.

Press Coverage of Nuclear Issues in our nation and our valley.

Times Free Press Editorial http://timesfreepress.com/news​/2011/jul/17/fresh-start-belle​fonte/#c97217
News Channel 12 coverage of press conference
http://wdef.com/news/zombies_protest_tva_possibly_restarting_bellefonte_nuclear_reactor_construction/07/2011
Times Free Press Coverage of the event http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/jul/21/plants-vs-zombies/
WRCB TV Zombie Swarm http://www.wrcbtv.com/story/15​115863/zombies-swarm-tva-prote​st-nuclear
NEWS Channel 9 coverage of the Chattanooga event http://www.newschannel9.com/ar​ticles/tva-1003169-downtown-re​porting.html
MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43​834875/ns/local_news-chattanoo​ga_tn/



AP Wire Report:
 http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/a00565aa57b84e47a6891ec2cc966055/TN--Nuke-Protesters/ 

Report from the "Zombie Post" http://zombiepost.com/brains/?​p=657

SACE blog AP expose of nuclear industry & NRC http://ht.ly/1dx49w

NYT Zombie article, Lou Zeller Comments: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06​/16/business/energy-environmen​t/16nuclear.html?_r=1

arklite.blogspot articles on the nuclear power issue http://arklite.blogspot.com/se​arch/label/Nuclear%20Power

A Nuclear Engineers Story, the Story of Mansour Guity, 'Der Spiegel International - Safety Concerns Cloud US Nuclear Renaissance:'  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,775209,00.html

Tennessean Article Safety Questions - Safety - whistle-blower harassment http://www.tennessean.com/arti​cle/20110719/BUSINESS/30719003​7/Critics-question-TVA-nuke-sa​fety-results?odyssey=mod%7Cnew​swell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cs

CBS expose Whistle blower, part 1- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories​/2011/07/19/earlyshow/main2008​0633.shtml
CBS expose Whistle blower, part 2- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories​/2011/07/20/earlyshow/main2008​0965.shtml

AP Impact Stories on Nuclear Power
Population- http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impac​t-populations-around-us-nuke-p​lants-soar-073429497.html
NRC rewrites plant safety history and findings http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap​/20110628/ap_on_re_us/us_aging​_nukes_part4
NRC weakens safety rules http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap​/20110620/ap_on_re_us/us_aging​_nukes_part1
Tritium leaks http://my.news.yahoo.com/ap-im​pact-tritium-leaks-found-many-​nuke-sites-070155807.html

TVA and the Environment

Hazardous Waste Spill from the Widows Creek Fossil Fuels plant waste pond spilling into the Tennessee River near Stevenson Al.

Massive hazardous Waste Spill due to a waste holding pond dam collapse, Kingston Fossil Fuels Plant, Harriman, Tn.

Members of the Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team, BEST, a local Chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, BREDL, at Bellefonte Landing.

TVA Board, the Quarterly Board meeting will be in Bristol, Va. in February 2009.

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January 25, 2009
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Open Letter to TVA Board
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The word is out that the TVA Board may consider taking away the funding for TVA's energy efficiency programs to pay for the Kingston Coal Ash Disaster.
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TVA's proclaimed mission for decades has been cheap power to energize Valley development.

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TVA's rule of thumb that environmental protection is unaffordable has consequences:
• TVA encouraged Tennesseans to build all-electric buildings - both residential and commercial - without regard to energy efficiency. Tennessee is second only to Alabama in the amount of electricity used per person.
• TVA consistently resisted environmental regulations and delayed compliance with them through the courts. Without the benefit of regulatory oversight, TVA's decision not to fix the Kingston dredge cell is just an example of its cutting environmental protection corners.
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Tennesseans want TVA to be environmentally responsible and a dynamo of energy efficiency. Including the costs of environmental protection, energy efficiency, and renewable energy into the cost of producing power will increase our rates but our bills will be lower because we will consume less. Unleashing the power of energy efficiency will allow TVA to reduce its production of coal ash.
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TVA must keep its energy efficiency and demand response programs on track to help every ratepayer. TVA needs to heal the environmental damage it has inflicted on the Valley. For an agency in search of a mission, certainly these two - energy efficiency and environmental protection - should keep TVA occupied through the rest of this century.
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Louise Gorenflo
BEST Member
Solar Valley Coalition
Cookeville, TN

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Absolutely Louise, thank you.

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More on the TVA from the "Tennessean" on the Toxic Waste Destruction at Kingston. http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090119/GREEN02/901190358

TVA Fails to Tell the Facts, Intentionally Fails to Report Construction Costs, Petition Filed

TVA's Bellefonte Dream, 2 AP 1000 reactors, costs were under estimated. The truth has not been told. Reactor plans have not been approved. The TVA has not approved this project and has spent millions upon millions of dollars with no approvals of any sort. Meanwhile the TVA is going further into debt.

TVA's original Bellefonte Nuclear Plants The two partially built 1256 MWe pressurized water reactors on the Bellefonte site were made by Babcock and Wilcox. The reactor pair are called a 205 design due to the number of fuel assemblies in the core. The original construction permits for Bellefonte were approved by the NRC in 1974. The TVA deferred completion of the plant in 1988 due to an over estimation of power needs in the area plus massive cost overruns. Unit 1 was 88% complete and unit 2 was approximately 58% complete.

The TVA has not been truthful in their filings to the NRC for the building of a Nuclear Power Plant at Bellefonte, Alabama. TVA intentionally underestimated costs for the construction of a pair of reactors at Bellefonte so as not to list alternative/sustainable energy resources available.

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BLUE RIDGE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE LEAGUE
www.BREDL.org PO Box 88 Glendale Springs, North Carolina 28629 BREDL@skybest.com (336) 982-2691 office, (336) 977-0852 cell

Esse quam videre

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DECEMBER 16, 2008

GROUPS DISPUTE TVA COST FIGURES
NEW LEGAL CHALLENGE AT BELLEFONTE

Today citizens’ groups announced new cost arguments in their lawsuit against nuclear power at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Bellefonte site. The December 15th filing charges that TVA provided inaccurate cost information in its environmental report. In an 18-page request to the three-judge licensing board, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, the Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy charged that TVA violated the National Environmental Policy Act.
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The petition states that TVA’s cost estimates and comparisons are grossly inaccurate for four reasons: 1) TVA failed to include the full range of costs for nuclear power, 2) TVA made apples-to-oranges comparisons with coal- and gas-fired options, 3) TVA improperly selected nuclear as the best available option, and 4) TVA excluded reasonable alternatives for getting electricity at lower cost. Under the law TVA must compare the impacts of nuclear power at Bellefonte with available alternatives. The comparison must include construction costs and the costs of power delivered to customers.
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Louis Zeller, the League’s Science Director, said “TVA's failure to estimate costs accurately spells trouble for its customers in seven states.” He continued, “We’ve been through enough bailouts already; let’s not continue the nuclear one.”
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Dr. Ross McCluney, a member of the Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team, said, “Considering the wave of energy efficiency technology and the clean renewable energy sources on the horizon, a nuclear plant at Bellefonte would be obsolete before it generated the first watt of power. To continue pushing for nuclear power in the U.S. just makes no sense.” Dr. McCluney is a research physicist for SunPine Consulting in Chattanooga and a retired Principal Research Scientist at the University of Central Florida.

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TVA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff have ten days to respond to the groups’ petition. Earlier this year TVA requested a license to build two new reactors at its Bellefonte site in northern Alabama. The League, BEST and SACE intervened in June and the NRC held a hearing in Scottsboro in July. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will hold further hearings on four of the groups’ legal arguments.
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Links to BREDL: http://www.bredl.org/ SACE: http://www.cleanenergy.org/

Nuclear Plant Proposals and NRC Failures

Electricity for all, maybe, if you can afford it. If TVA has their way in their irresponsible management of the government owned socialistic enterprise your electric rates will realize a tremendous increase. Wall Street refuses to finance nuclear power without 100% government subsidies in nuclear projects.

TVA's dream, a pair of AP 1000's. Never mind that TVA can't afford this project and that its debt continues to climb.

TVA debt, $25 billion and climbing. Rapidly approaching the mandated $30 billion Congressional cap on their debt.
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NEWS RELEASE Contact: Jim Warren, 919-416-5077
November 13, 2008 *Additional contacts below

Nuclear Plant Proposals Challenged by Southeast, National Groups

Legal Action Says Westinghouse Design is Plagued by Flaws, Four Years’ Delay

DURHAM, NC – An attempted revival of U.S. nuclear power is plagued by design problems that have severely delayed federal approval of the reactor most chosen by utilities hoping to build new plants. A coordinated legal action announced today by watchdog groups across the Southeast and in Washington challenges the licensing process by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as unlawful.

The NRC has canceled a 2007 pledge to review and re-certify the standard design by 2011, and has missed several deadlines for committing to a new timetable. The groups say plant designs must be completed and genuinely certified before the agency or others can assess safety and financial risks of the multi-billion dollar projects.

The Westinghouse AP1000 was pronounced “certified” by the NRC in January 2006, a step deemed vital to standardizing the blueprint before utilities began filing applications late last year to build and operate the plants. Since then, problems involving major components and operating systems have multiplied.

The NRC cannot approve a plant’s license until the design is fully certified. But continuing design modifications have created a quandary for NRC staff and opponents trying to review the license applications by Progress Energy, TVA, Duke Energy, Southern Company, SC Electric and others. Applications are deeply rooted in more than 6,500 pages of technical design documents, and the agency is attempting to review and approve the complex and evolving design separately from the applications themselves.

Westinghouse recently submitted the 17th version of the AP1000 design, but all the plant applications are based on an earlier, uncertified version. The seven organizations filing legal action contend that the utilities are now required to resubmit applications based on the latest design.

“The NRC appears to be making up the process as they go,” said Sara Barczak of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a regional group contesting plants in Georgia and elsewhere. “The application and design reviews are leap-frogging each other, but both keep sliding backward.”

The alliance is filing parallel motions in various NRC proceedings across the Southeast involving Westinghouse projects. Similar motions are being filed this month by attorneys for Texas and Virginia opponents of a General Electric design that’s being plagued by similar flaws. The groups are also coordinating opposition in state rate commissions and other venues. Attorneys with the NC Utilities Commission last week cited unresolved design problems in questioning whether Duke Energy could afford to build the AP1000 at its Lee site in South Carolina.

“It is clearly unlawful for the NRC to review license applications prior to genuine certification
of the AP1000 design,” explained Lou Zeller of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, which is leading the federal intervention against Duke Energy’s proposed Lee 1&2 reactors in South Carolina, along with TVA’s Bellefonte project in Alabama. “The industry jumped the gun before the blueprints were finished, but they cannot redirect their problem onto intervenors and NRC staffers trying to review these ever-changing, complex documents.”

Contentious meetings between NRC, Westinghouse and AP1000 applicants have continued to reveal additional disputes over regulatory, technical and legal requirements. The latest version of the AP1000 is not yet available to the public. But in the previous iteration, now sidelined, only 21 of 172 sections had been cleared by the NRC in over two years of review. Last week the agency proposed a new approach to handling design changes that are expected to continue throughout the approval process: granting licenses, possibly by 2012, then later amending them in order to incorporate alterations to the design.

Standardization is considered crucial to avoiding the interlocking mistakes, delays and cost overruns during licensing and construction that forced scores of costly midstream cancellations in the 1980s. FORBES magazine blamed state rate commissions and industry executives for most of that debacle, calling it “the largest managerial disaster in business history.” French-owned AREVA, Inc. is already in trouble while building a plant in Finland that has suffered a 50% cost increase and is years behind schedule.

“Without having the current configuration, design and operating procedures in the application, neither the costs nor the risks of severe accidents can be determined,” said NC WARN Attorney John Runkle. “Until major components are incorporated into the application for a full review, much of the interaction between components cannot be resolved.”

"This disarray goes to the heart of the so-called nuclear revival," said Louise Gorenflo of the Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team. "No standardization. No schedules. And no protection for electricity customers and US taxpayers if these companies keep plowing millions of dollars into these risky projects." Southeastern legislatures recently shifted much of the financial risk to ratepayers, although Wall Street still insists it won't finance nuclear plants without 100% backing by federal taxpayers.

The groups contend that alternatives to new plants – efficiency and renewable power – are far better for reducing greenhouse gases and for protecting against the skyrocketing power bills new nuclear plants would likely cause.

As Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a technical expert following the new reactor issue, stated last month in Raleigh: “The same Wall Street that eagerly invested in sub-prime securities has been saying ‘no’ for three years to new nuclear projects unless hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are backing the loans. That ought to mean something to Congress.”

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Additional contacts:
Louise Gorenflo, Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team (931) 484-2633
Lou Zeller, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (336) 977-0852
Paul Gunter, Beyond Nuclear (301) 523-0201
Tom Clement, Friends of the Earth, (803) 240-7268
Sara Barczak, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (912) 201-0354
Michael Marriotte, Nuclear Information and Resource Service (301)-270-6477

More on the No Nuclear TVA Movement

"The TVA should be setting leadership examples instead of poisoning the enviroment." Comments by Mr. David Freeman. Link to the issue from the Chattanooga Times Free Press: http://timesfreepress.com/news/2008/jun/13/chattanooga-ex-tva-head-blasts-plans-nuke-plants/

Link to the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League: http://www.bredl.org/

BELLEFONTE EFFICIENCY & SUSTAINABILITY TEAM

The Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team, BEST, a local chapter of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, cordially invites all citizens to an informational session and membership drive on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 6PM at the Scottsboro Rec Com, 701 South Houston Street, Room 103. If you, your family or friends are concerned about a Nuclear Power Plant being built in Jackson County at the the Bellefonte Site please attend this meeting. Informational handouts on nuclear energy concerns will be available. There will be a moderated question and answer session after the informational presentation. The session will last approximately 1 to 1 1/2 hours. (photo by Tom Moss, BEST)