US power utility Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has entered into a contract to sell the partially completed Bellefonte nuclear power plant to Nuclear Development through a public auction with an established minimum price. The buyer will invest up to US$13bn to complete construction of the nuclear energy facility, beginning in 2017.
The Bellefonte site includes two pressurized water reactors, whose construction started in the mid 1970s and was suspended in 1988 (around 55% complete). In 2007, TVA submitted a combined construction and operation licence (COL) application to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for two new AP1000 units, Bellefonte 3 and 4, before requesting the NRC to reinstate the construction permits for units 1 and 2 and to defer the COL application for units 3 and 4. Construction permits for the first two units were reinstated in 2009 and TVA announced plans to complete the first reactor in 2011 (estimated cost of US$4.9bn, revised US$7.5-8.7bn in late 2014).
TVA, which recently commissioned the Watts Bar 2 nuclear power plant, will not need to build any new large-scale base-load power capacity for at least 20 years and did not include new units at Bellefonte in its 2015 Integrated Resource Plan.
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