U.S. federal regulators have approved an operating license for TVA’s Watts Bar Unit 2, allowing the first new American nuclear plant to begin operation in nearly two decades.<\/p>\n
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the go-ahead to the Tennessee Valley Authority on Thursday to load uranium fuel into the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor in Spring City, Tenn., about 50 miles southwest of Knoxville. The government-run power agency can put the plant into commercial operation once it successfully completes a series of tests and inspections.<\/p>\n
The Spring City reactor that will be the United State’s first new nuclear-generating plant of the 21st century has gotten the go-ahead from the federal government.<\/p>\n
The last nuclear unit to get an operating license in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 1 in February 1996.<\/p>\n
“This achievement signifies more than a stage in construction for TVA,” President and CEO Bill Johnson said<\/a><\/span>. “It demonstrates to the people of the Valley that we have taken every step possible to deliver low-cost, carbon-free electricity safely and with the highest quality.”<\/p>\n The initial $2.5 billion restart project for the Unit 2 reactor has ended up taking nearly three years longer and nearly $2 billion more to finish.<\/p>\n TVA Chief Executive Bill Johnson said he expects the new Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor to reach full power within a few months<\/a><\/span>. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be slow, but we are going to be deliberate,\u201d he said, to ensure everything works properly before ramping up electricity production.<\/p>\n Watts Bar Unit 2 is new because it just got permission to operate, but its design and technology are very much a thing of the past. Construction at Watts Bar actually began way back in 1973, and continued until 1985, according to City Lab<\/a><\/span>. That\u2019s when major safety concerns delayed the opening<\/a><\/span> of the first reactor until 1996 and TVA abandoned plans to finish the second, which they only decided to restart in 2007.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a 20th-century reactor\u2014it\u2019s not a 21st-century reactor,\u201d says Dave Lochbaum, who worked for the TVA as a nuclear engineer in the 1980s and now directs the Nuclear Safety Project<\/a><\/span> at the Union of Concerned Scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s called \u2018new build\u2019 but there\u2019s an asterisk on that.\u201d<\/p>\n City Lab report<\/a><\/span> also points out groups critical of nuclear power frequently cite Fukushima to argue<\/a><\/span> that we should \u201cphase out dangerous nuclear energy entirely<\/span>.\u201d<\/a> Certainly the disaster showed that even reactors in highly advanced countries carry a certain amount of risk, but it also exposed some very practical safety procedures that should be standard in any nuclear plant, and are very doable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" U.S. federal regulators have approved an operating license for TVA’s Watts Bar Unit 2, allowing the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,125],"tags":[152,108,7],"class_list":["post-3122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-energy","tag-nuclear","tag-u-s"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/first-new-US-nuclear-plant.jpg?fit=690%2C370&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7jJWb-Om","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3124,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions\/3124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ir-ia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}