Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has been urged by US Senate Jeff Sessions, Republican Alabama, to double its nuclear power generation by completing or building a total of four reactors at the Bellefonte nuclear plant site. The Alabama Republican said that TVA will need what Sessions said will be clean and safe power from more nuclear reactors here. Sessions has urged TVA to finish the original two reactors it began building in 1974 and adjoin the next generation of reactors on the same site.

This is a fabulous technological engineering facility, Sessions said. I am more motivated than ever to see this facility operate and am more confident than ever that it will.

There is just no doubt that this will save money for the people in this region, Sessions said.

Sara Barczak, energy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy said, TVA began gutting part of the original Bellefonte plant, and the new reactors are still an unproven technology that seems to get more expensive the more it is developed.

Sessions conceded that it is still an unknown how much, if any, the Obama administration will push for nuclear power.

The US president will appoint members to both the TVA board and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2009, and those panels could shape how much investment in nuclear power is made in Tennessee Valley. The Obama’s administration has balked at fast deployment of nuclear reprocessing facilities and raised more questions about licensing the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage plant.

Those two decisions were not good, Sessions said. There is a great deal of fear among those who may invest five or six billion dollars in a new nuclear plant that they don’t get caught in a regulatory nightmare.

NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki said that federal regulators have tried to be more responsive in the past decade to those the NRC regulates. Svinicki said she was impressed by TVA’s very deliberate manner in which they are looking at every component of those plants it is reviving and finishing. TVA presently operates six reactors and plans to complete another reactor in Tennessee by 2012.

TVA has suspended construction at the original twin-reactor complex in 1988 when the growth in power demand slowed and plant building costs soared. TVA in 2006 has ultimately scrapped plans to ever finish the original reactors in favor of construction of a new simpler and less costly reactor design from Westinghouse Corpooration. known as the AP-1000.