Surveys Show Southerners Strongest in Nuke Support

Sep 13 - Chattanooga Times/Free Press

Jim Fuller says he is proud to be part of a true nuclear family.

The second-generation TVA employee is eager for his two high school-age sons to also work in the utility industry and urged regulators this week to allow TVA to build more nuclear power plants to boost the region's economy.

"If you were from this area in the past and you wanted to go far, you literally had to go far," said Mr. Fuller, who left the Tennessee Valley to work in South Florida before returning to TVA. "We need more power, and we need more jobs."

Mr. Fuller was among dozens of North Alabama and North Georgia residents who voiced support this week for TVA's plans to add more nuclear power at sites where TVA halted construction in the 1980s.

Despite TVA's troubled record building nuclear plants a generation ago, neighbors to both the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant near here and the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tenn., say they are anxious for TVA to resume construction at the two sites.

"While you never have 100 percent agreement on anything, our community has already wrestled with the issues of nuclear power back in the 1970s, and we saw the tremendous economic benefit from the building of these plants," said Ron Bailey, a former Scottsboro, Ala., mayor who now leads the business development committee for the Greater Jackson County Chamber of Commerce in Northeast Alabama.

In Jackson County, 15 government and community groups, including all nine local governments, passed resolutions urging TVA to build new reactors at the Bellefonte site in Hollywood, Ala., Mr. Bailey said.

A recent survey of those living within a 10-mile radius of the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant also found support for TVA's plans to finish building a second reactor at the Rhea County plant in Tennessee.

A telephone poll of 300 adults living around Watts Bar this summer found that more than two-thirds "strongly agree" the Unit 2 reactor should be finished. Another 20 percent "somewhat agree" with TVA's plans to complete the unit. Fewer than one in seven people surveyed said they thought TVA's plans for Watts Bar Unit 2 were not acceptable.

The survey, commissioned by the industry-backed Nuclear Energy Institute, also found that 92 percent of Watts Bar neighbors gave favorable ratings to the way the Unit 1 reactor has operated.

State Rep. Jim Cobb, R-Spring City, a former senior control operator in TVA nuclear plants, said the community is comfortable with nuclear power and anxious for the 2,500 construction jobs Watts Bar and Bellefonte each will create during their construction over the next decade.

"Having worked at TVA, I know these plants are safe, and it's the way to go," Rep. Cobb told the TVA board last month prior to TVA's decision to authorize completion of the Unit 2 reactor.

Critics of nuclear power, however, question the long-term value of more nuclear power plants.

"I don't think it is the sustainable source of economic growth that some think when you are creating nuclear wastes that last for hundreds of thousands of years just so you can have electricity for 30 or 40 years," said Don Safer, chairman of the Tennessee Environmental Council in Nashville.

"The Southeast seems to be acting like a national sacrifice area again," Mr. Safer said. "We allow people to cut down our timber to make paper, chop off the top of our mountains to get coal and now create more nuclear wastes to generate electricity."

Most of the new nuclear plants proposed by U.S. utilities are in the Southeast where surveys indicate support for nuclear power is the greatest. Among 29 plants proposed to be built under a new streamlined licensing process, 27 are below the Mason-Dixon line, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

TVA and other Southern utilities say they are turning back to nuclear power to meet rising power demands in the growing Sunbelt without incurring the problems with global warming and air pollution caused by coal-fired power plants.

U.S. Rep. Bud Cramer, the Huntsville, Ala., Democrat whose congressional district includes both the Browns Ferry and Bellefonte nuclear sites, said this week that new reactors at Bellefonte will boost power output and job opportunities in the region.

"I am proud that North Alabama is among the first communities in the country to take this important step toward new nuclear power production," he said in a prepared statement.

E-mail Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com