Insight Web Extra
Fall 2011—Americans all around the country were affected by the Great Depression, but rural residents of the Tennessee River Valley were particularly hard-hit. While 90 percent of urban Americans had electricity in their homes during the 1930s, only 10 percent of rural dwellers could say the same.
The issue was money. Electric utilities resisted stringing power lines in more isolated areas because it was expensive. Even if they had access to electricity, poor farmers often couldn’t afford to keep the lights on.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal offered a solution: the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government-owned corporation. Part of its mission was to provide access to electrical power.
The plan was not without its opponents, but the benefits of TVA’s projects were dramatic. Electric lights and work-saving home appliances improved the lives of farm families, and more generally available electricity lured industry and much-needed jobs to the region.
The result: By the end of the 1930s, more than 7,000 miles of new transmission lines were strung in rural areas, 85 percent of which carried electricity to areas that never experienced its life-changing power. By the end of World War II, TVA was the country’s largest electricity supplier, much of it provided by hydro-electric dams.
Post-war economic growth called for even more electricity. TVA expanded, and in 1966 it started construction of its first nuclear energy facility, the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama. When it began operating in 1974, Browns Ferry was the world’s largest nuclear energy facility. Two more reactors came online at Browns Ferry in 1975 and 1977.
Construction of the two Sequoia reactors in Tennessee began in 1969 and was completed in 1980.
In 1985, TVA shut down all of its nuclear energy facilities, but reopened two of the Browns Ferry reactors in 1991 and 1995. The third Browns Ferry reactor reopened in 2007, becoming the first reactor to come on line in the 21st century. The company wants to add two others to the grid in the coming years.
TVA has a portfolio of fossil, hydro and renewable energy facilities, but it is putting renewed emphasis on low-carbon, reliable nuclear power. Watts Bar Unit 1 in Tennessee, on which work had earlier been suspended, began operating in 1996.
Residents near the Bellefonte project in Alabama hope this new wave of nuclear energy construction brings renewed economic development to the region. Local business owners like restaurant owner Miles Smith hope for a big boost in sales. Smith told Huntsville’s WAAY-TV that he hopes “it will increase [sales] about 25 percent. That will be a big, big impact; it really will.”
—Read more articles in Nuclear Energy Insight and Insight Web Extra.