Almost five years ago we wrote on this page: “It is truly amazing to understand the vast waste of [electricity] Taxpayer and taxpayer money has been lost on the location, construction, scrapping, reconstruction and abandonment of the Bellefonte nuclear power plant. “

Today we can add to that. It is truly astonishing to understand the vast waste of taxpayer and VAT taxpayer money lost on site, construction, scrapping, re-building, abandonment, putting up for sale, near-sale and now in court to defend not to sell the Bellefonte nuclear power plant. .

Based on construction costs alone, the Tennessee Valley Authority says we’ve already spent between $ 5 billion and $ 6 billion since 1970 when the Federal Utility announced the plant and began work on it four years later on an absolutely beautiful 1600 acre lot in the North. Alabama between Highway 72 and the Tennessee River in Jackson County.

However, five members of Congress wrote in 2018 that the total cost of VAT at Bellefonte was $ 9 billion. Hey, what’s a billion here and a billion over there? These members of Congress – four from Alabama and our own representative from Tennessee Chuck Fleischmann – asked in a letter they wrote to Donald Trump’s US Department of Energy that the DOE in effect leave us the taxpayers and taxpayers pay for the plant again.

This time they wanted us to subsidize the privatization of Bellefonte and its nuclear power by billionaire Chattanooga developer and financier Franklin L. Haney with up to $ 6 billion in government guaranteed loans and $ 2 billion. production tax credits. In other words, Haney would use our money to get into the nuclear power business.

First, the simple fact that TVA in 2016 never put a sign “for sale” seeking a $ 36.4 million – with an M – minimum bid out of the nearly completed $ 9 billion – with a B – Bellefonte and its vast area should, in our opinion, be considered a cause for a mock criminal trial.

But at the moment, the only trial is a civil trial in a federal courtroom in Huntsville. The question to be decided is whether Haney – who in 2016 quickly offered $ 111 million – will end up with this property or if TVA will keep it after the sale is canceled in 2018.

And it’s complicated. Haney’s nuclear team, Nuclear Development LLC, failed to complete an estimated $ 13 billion completion plan that could persuade the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the transfer of the nuclear license from TVA to him before the two-year VAT sales deadline.

“Our position from the start was that as Nuclear Development failed to secure the transfer of the building permit from NRC, they did not meet the legal requirements to complete the sale because NRC requires this transfer of the permit. “said TVA President Jeff Lyash. the Times Free Press in a recent interview. “We didn’t make the sale properly, and now that contract has expired.”

Haney’s lawyers counter that TVA failed to provide “reasonable cooperation” with Haney’s new business, which was required by the original 2016 sales contract.

This case is a “simple breach of contract case,” said Caine O’Rear III, an attorney for Haney’s company.

The Huntsville court judge said the case was clouded by a notorious dispute over how and to whom Haney’s company could sell Bellefonte’s future power. In statements regarding the purchase, Haney and TVA indicated that the electricity would be sold to TVA for resale. But the hiring of Haney, former VAT chief operating officer Bill McCollum, in a meeting with officials from Memphis Light Gas & Water, urged the city-owned utility to buy its electricity from Bellefonte or to other suppliers, and not to VAT.

Did we mention that the Memphis utility is TVA’s biggest customer?

Former TVA chairman Bill Johnson, who made the decision not to give Haney a second extension of the sales contract, said he was irritated by McCollum’s comments in Memphis. But Johnson said he ended the sale deal with Haney in the fall of 2018 because he wasn’t sure Nuclear Development could ever get NRC approval to take over the unfinished plant, not to stifle potential competition from Nuclear Development or to block its efforts to urge Memphis to part ways with TVA.

But eccentric Haney, 80, once a door-to-door Bible seller and still a bipartisan political donor and spendthrift, is not walking away humbly. For decades he made a pretty dime out of government, building or buying hundreds of millions of dollars in buildings that he used to own the government. It also has one of the largest private toll roads in the country. And now he has a new goal.

For the past decade, he has strived to position himself to become the first individual to own and operate a commercial nuclear power plant in America.

And why not? There are billions of dollars in tax credits and loan guarantees for it, and he’s been pressuring everyone to help him get some of it – from those five congressmen to Donald. Trump to Trump fixer Michael Cohen to Qatari foreign investors, according to reports. by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and other major news agencies.

We all have to hope and pray that TVA gets stuck with this dormant factory and its land.

If nothing else, all of those acres would make a beautiful solar and wind farm. Gosh, that should spark some electricity in the age of climate change. And it can’t cost us more than paying for Haney’s new wild hair business.