Last Thursday, March 20, Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) published an op-ed in Power Magazine arguing that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) should:
- Immediately file an SMR construction application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- Seek funding from the Department of Energy Generation III+ Small Modular Reactor Program.
- Stop analysis paralysis from getting in the way of producing a first-in-class SMR.
- Articulate a plan, and the resources necessary, for the nation’s largest public utility to command a lead in the provision of energy for the country’s technological innovations that will ensure American leadership throughout this century and beyond.
In doing so, the Senators have recklessly engaged in attempted micromanagement of TVA’s leadership and put taxpayers and TVA customers at risk of financial disaster.
Reckless Attempt at Micromanaging TVA
Although we at SACE have a laundry list of criticisms of TVA’s decisionmaking and its current leadership, we do not agree that U.S. Senators, lacking understanding and experience in energy related issues, have the authority nor the knowledge needed to step in and make decisions on the utility’s behalf. Increasing accountability and transparency at TVA remain top priorities for SACE – and we will continue to ask questions and fact check TVA’s assumptions at every crossroads – but micromanagement by elected officials without subject matter expertise is not the answer.
The Senators’ claim that “analysis paralysis” is getting in the way of TVA leading a nuclear renaissance shows complete disregardfor protocols surrounding cost and analytics that TVA is under clear directive to undertake. The Senators seem to be suggesting that TVA should pursue expensive new nuclear construction without evaluating the costs or how long new nuclear resources would take to come online; and that ratepayers should willingly be on the hook to shoulder the billions of dollars without considering the alternatives. Reports continue to show that SMRs are not cost effective, which is a primary reason TVA did not prioritize this technology in its most recent IRP. And while we do have criticisms of the recent IRP, we believe TVA’s particular decision to avoid endangering ratepayers is sound.
We’ve Seen This Before – It Wasn’t Pretty Then. And It Would Be Even Uglier Today if We Allow History to Repeat Itself
This isn’t the first time nuclear power has been touted as the future of the Tennessee Valley. In the 1970s TVA went on a binge of nuclear: proposing 17 new nuclear plants, across Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Of these 17, only 7 were completed: 3 units at Browns Ferry (Alabama), 2 at Sequoyah (Tennessee), and 2 at Watts Bar (Tennessee), although Watts Bar 2 wasn’t completed until 2016. The other 10 were never completed, but contributed to a whopping $20 billion + debt that TVA customers are still paying down. In fact TVA’s nuclear power program in the 1960s and 1970s became one of the most dramatic — and troubled — nuclear expansions in U.S. history. The financial burden of this shortsighted plan is still impacting families and businesses in the region. Do we have amnesia?
The planned TVA reactors were spread across several sites:
- Browns Ferry (Alabama) – 3 units
- Sequoyah (Tennessee) – 2 units
- Watts Bar (Tennessee) – 2 units
- Bellefonte (Alabama) – 2 units (never completed)
- Phipps Bend (Tennessee) – 2 units (never completed)
- Hartsville (Tennessee) – 4 units (never completed)
- Yellow Creek (Mississippi) – 2 units (never completed)
The Senators last week made an analogy in their op-ed comparing their proposed nuclear expansion to NASA’s going to the moon: “TVA could be to the nuclear race what NASA was to the space race.” The multi-billion dollar pricetag that applies to both projects in this comparison is analogous, but where the NASA mission was taxpayer funded, TVA’s budget is shouldered ultimately by the electric customers throughout the Tennessee Valley in seven states. The ultimate question with unproven technology is who carries the risk of delays, cost overruns, and failure to complete. TVA bill payers have already learned this hard lesson, but Senators Blackburn and Hagerty would have us repeat the mistakes of the past.
The sad irony of this reckless proposal is that of the seven nuclear units TVA currently currently has operational, three units (42% of TVA’s nuclear capacity) are offline as we post this and have been unreliable through this winter’s demand, causing significant increases in costly imported power and outages leading to major interruptions like closing schools to save power (as explained in this voicemail from Hamilton County Schools). If TVA is facing power shortfalls today and its existing nuclear fleet is unreliable, it is absolute folly to propose increasing its reliance on nuclear by focusing on resources that will take 10, 15, or even 20 years to come online.
Former TN Senator Bill Frist restructured the TVA Board in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, changing it from a three member full-time board to a nine member part-time Board with a CEO. He did this in an attempt to make TVA decisionmaking less politically driven. In their state of amnesia, the current Senators are appearing to completely discount this history. Their proposal to make TVA leadership hyperpartisan in the pursuit of a one-dimensional commitment to unproven SMR technology is misguided and potentially very dangerous.
TVA Needs Reforms, Not Recklessness
Does TVA need reform and potential serious restructuring? Yes. Is the reckless op-ed by Tennessee’s current ill-informed Senators a serious proposal? Not even close. SACE has challenged TVA’s leadership to lead on 21st century technology that is cost effective and financially responsible and solves both near-term and long-term energy challenges. We have also supported serious proposals to explore expanding TVA generation and transmission. So far TVA’s current leadership and Board have fallen short.
We welcome serious debate and thoughtful proposals, but this op-ed represents the opposite of what is needed at this moment.
The post Suffering from Delusions of Nuclear Grandeur and Amnesia, TN Senators Recklessly Step into TVA Leadership appeared first on SACE | Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
The substance of the meme here is correct; Florida public schools require comprehensive K-12 instruction on the history and dangers of communism, following a series of legislative moves and curriculum standards. The updated “History of Communism” curriculum is rolling out for the 2026–2027 school year, mandating that students learn about the “brutal realities” and (the catastrophic) global impact of communist regimes.
When I was a schoolboy in the 1960s and early 1970s, we came to learn that all efforts to establish a viable communist nation had failed, but our teachers were not shackled as to what they could teach and how they could teach it. As a result, we came to a variety of helpful viewpoints, and these are what I offered my own kids as they were growing up, e.g.,
- “Men are not angels,” as my sixth-grade social studies teacher explained. Those who do not need to work in order to survive can simply goof off.
- Yet idleness is averse to most people’s psychological needs to be an active and productive person, and member of society.
- Power corrupts, and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. Democracy prevents the accumulation of a pathological amount of power on the part of any one leader. (This was assumed to be true until Donald Trump’s second term.)
- If Lenin (a butcher) hadn’t had Trotsky (a compassionate intellectual) assassinated, the entirety of the USSR would have turned out completely differently.
- If the U.S. hadn’t, through its embargoes, made it impossible for Cuba to offer its people a decent quality of life, their revolution may have succeeded and brought forth a new way of thinking.
- There are examples of smaller scale societies in which the ideals of communism work out very nicely, e.g., the Israeli kibbutz.
- We read and discussed at length a book called “Social Ideals and Ideal Societies” in which these concepts were analyzed fairly and in great depth.
Now, will the typical American schoolchild turn out better if he’s cut off from thinking critically about all this and forced to accept the mantra that “communism = evil?” The typical Florida Republican would say the answer is an obvious yes, but most intelligent people would dispute that.
Producing educated people who can think for themselves is an idea quite opposed to the ongoing control of a population.
To the author of the meme here, I say: It’s safe to say that most folks in Trump’s MAGA base are stupid, though one needs more than a low IQ to fit into this segment.
In particular, we mustn’t omit mean-spiritedness. People who are kind, compassionate, decent and tolerant of others are grossly unqualified to be rank-and-file Trumpers.
Trump appeals to two groups of constituents: a) a small group of billionaires who lavish him with campaign contributions in exchange for huge financial favors, and b) a large number of poorly educated white people who call themselves Christians–the so-called MAGA base.
Trump has little if any appeal to everybody else: honest, fairly well-educated people of a variety of ethnicities and religious affiliations.
For Trump, staying in power means making sure that there is a minimum of leakage away from the MAGA base. That requires barraging these people with messaging to the effect that the president is the only thing standing in the way of communism/socialism, open borders, the invasion of Muslims, godlessness, teaching our little children about LGBTQs, critical race theory, choking environmental regulation, and whatever else may be on the radical left’s agenda.
Maintain this chasm means not letting up on the propaganda for a single minute. No nuance, no critical thinking, no considering what we’ve learned from history–just constant bombardment.
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