Spring City, TN: TVA Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, 2016 1.15gw Unit 2

(Satellite)

TVA posted
Columns of water vapor rise from both cooling towers at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, TN, in this gorgeous photo taken from one of our helicopters with the Tennessee River in the foreground.
Watts Bar Nuclear Plant provides nearly 2,300 megawatts of carbon-free energy, enough for 1.2 million homes.

Oct 19, 2016: TVA-news
Watts Bar Unit 2 Complete and Commercial
TVA's seventh operating nuclear reactor took 20 years and $4.7b to build. It was completed on budget. 
Their timeline of the construction has quite a few photos.

 

Scene in Rhea County posted
Watts Bar Nuclear Plant during construction (1970s)
Photos courtesy of Charles Morgan
Ted Lyons shared

Bob Ciminel posted
Plants where I've worked. Watts Bar, TVA, Spring City, TN

bechtel
Unit 2 was delayed between 1985 and 2007 because of a projected decrease in demand. The plant was 60% done in 1985.

The steam generator had to be replaced after just 8 years of service? Evidently the plant was not properly "mothballed" in 1985. [powermag] They should have consulted with the US Navy as to how to mothball equipment.

Jul 15, 2022: Brad Santaniello posted
Watts Bar Nuclear. Unit 2 Steam Generator Replacement

It is unfortunate that TVA's 2016 news release explicitly claimed the unit's construction was on budget. Because once you catch an organization telling a big lie, you can never trust them again.

Apr 5, 2012: power-eng
"The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on April 5 provided an update on the progress of construction at the Watts Bar 2 nuclear power plant near Spring City, Tenn. Expected to be completed by 2013 with a total cost of $2.49 billion, TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore said the estimates on both cost and time were wrong."
[Costing almost double the 2007 budget is not "on budget!" They did meet their 2012 estimate for cost, but not their date for being operational.]
Unit 1 was started in 1973 and finished in 1996. Unit 2 was also started in 1973, but halted in 1985.

TVA via eia
I don't think the $4.7b cost includes the $1.7b that was spent before 1985.
[So their clim in the Oct 19, 2016 news release that $4.7 was "on budget" is off by another $1.7b.]

Jun 14, 2016: eia
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System
"Although Watts Bar 2 is the first new U.S. nuclear generator to come online in 20 years, four other reactors are currently under construction and are expected to join the nuclear fleet within the next four years. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant Units 3 and 4 in Georgia and Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station Units 2 and 3 in South Carolina are scheduled to become operational in 2019–20, adding 4,540 MW of generation capacity."

TVA
How Watts Bar Works
"The plant supports approximately 1,000 full-time jobs."
[A coal-fired plant of comparable capacity would need less than a tenth of that many jobs. And ComEd plants need "only" 400 people.]

A couple of  the TVA photos from powermag.

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On Apr 1, 2014, TVA tweeted a couple of photos with the comment: "Watts Bar Nuclear Plant crews lift a low-pressure turbine rotor during the plant's outage." (I assume this is not an April Fools joke.)

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TVA posted five photos with the comment:

Here is something you don't see every day! Highly skilled teams direct the safe loading of 88 fuel assemblies into the Unit 2 reactor core at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant during the recent maintenance and refueling outage. The blue glow is called Cherenkov radiation and is normal.

Unit 2 is back in operation with the rest of the nuclear fleet, which supplies over 40% of the region's electric load with carbon-free energy. 

We're going to need it because summer isn't over yet!

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Unit 1 had "an incident" in 2015. [ans-2020] The article explains that two managers and a plant operator were punished for prioritizing money over safety. But it did not explain what went wrong.

 

I found this in a Google search result, but the link was broken.

FIRE SHUTS DOWN WATTS BAR NUCLEAR PLANT - 105.7 News Crossville Rockwood Byrdstwon TN

I finally found:

According to NRC documents, on Nov. 11, 2015, a shift manager at Watts Bar directed the control room to begin heating up a reactor even though the plant's usual pressurizer system, which keeps the reactor water from turning to steam, was out of service. When trying to heat up with an alternate system, the pressurizer rapidly began to fill with water. Staff then had to “take actions outside of proper operating procedures” to bring the water level down.

The incident wasn't recorded in the plant's logbook and managers later misled NRC investigators about what had happened. The shift manager told investigators he wasn't truthful with them at first because he feared that whatever he said would be relayed back to management. The shift manager has since relinquished his senior reactor operator's license, according to the letter.

The NRC determined that several of the violations were willful, writing that managers allowed “production and cost to override safety."

“The problem is not so much the way TVA handled the startup — it wasn't like we were 30 minutes away from losing Knoxville, or something like that — it's that TVA managers misled or lied to the NRC investigator,” said Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who has worked with both TVA and the NRC as well as the Union of Concerned Scientists.

[manufacturing]