re: TVA is asking people to conserve power in this time of high usage

Laugh it up you selfish aholes, but your ICE vehicles and nuclear power is causing this global warming and extreme weather.

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TVA is not a government agency, it is a government owned corporation which means it is more independent than an agency and, in the case of TVA, does not rely on public funding. It also means TVA is subject to the same financial regulations that all corporations are subject to, unlike an agency. TVA operations are funded from revenue derived from the production of electricity almost exclusively. They do not receive money from taxpayers like an agency does.

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TVA was created by Congress for FDR's Raw Deal.

Only Congress can kill TVA.

No matter how you word it, TVA is government owned and operated.

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It’s a crazy story, but after a court case, they still do own it after agreeing to sell it and backing out. The licenses have now been allowed to expire, so 1&2 will never go online.

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They were not going online when they were sold. The paper trail is non-existent and the costs to re-establish that, coupled with the fact that at the end of the day that re-established paper trail would consist of the design authority picking up a Big Pin, in black ink, and saying eerything is fine, would lead to public mistrust of epic proportions. I was involved in a high level, million mile high, study to establish the possibility of re-establishing any semblance of a meaningful QA program and it can't be done outside of finding a PE with the credentials who would place their reputation at stake to sign off. There is no such person because even the most inept and corrupt PE in the world could not support their claims in the certain litigation which would follow.

TVA has done a LOT of stupid shite over the years. Somehow, bling pigs and acorns, they did the right thing at Sequoyah and Browns Ferry. There are reams of corporate documents bearing this out...knowing that the public was tepid in their support of nuclear power TVA took it upon itself to make every requirement more stringent than those of the private sector. For a myriad of reasons Bellefonte was an outlier. Watts Bar also suffered somewhat from the same decisions that doomed Bellefonte. TVA requirements are, to this day, far more stringent than those required by the NRC. Not that TVA always complies, but they do have a pretty good track record in the industry.

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TVA was created by Congress for FDR's Raw Deal.

Only Congress can kill TVA.

No matter how you word it, TVA is government owned and operated.

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All absolutely correct...but they are not an agency. They are a government owned corporation and more independent than an agency, have the same corporate responsibilities as any other corporation and do not receive any taxpayer funding. The VAST majority of TVA "employees" are not federal employees...and have not been for about 30 years. They are contractor employees. That is a MASSIVE difference between TVA and most (not all) government "agencies".

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Remember that more people died at Chappaquiddick than at Three Mile Island.


Radiation exposure takes longer than a day to kill you.

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The radiation detector at Dickinson College (only 30m away from 3MI) went off when the Chinese tested their first nuclear bomb, but not when the Three Mile Island incident occurred

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As I stated, no matter how you word it, they are government.

The contractor bullshite needs to go away. This is the door for kickbacks and graft.

The waste, fraud, and outright theft by these contractors is simply mind-boggling.

One of the biggest areas of theft is man hours. I know a lot of union guys on the contract jobs. Even so much as a steady pace will get you screamed at by the union. Literally the unwritten rule is "slow and not very productive".

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Labor unions were the last bastion against the privatization of TVAs workforce because labor understood that it was being done not to improve efficiencies, which would in turn mean higher wages and benefits for their members, but instead to create a profit windfall for private investors financed by consumers. It was, however, the 1980s and at least half the nation was convinced that any government spending was worse than anything happening in the USSR and here we are. Yes, when contractors took over nothing changed except rates increased and investors made money where none had been available before. It was transfer of wealth from consumers to private investors and is ongoing and will never end.

Nuclear power is NOTORIOUSLY inefficient in terms of labor...TVA is no worse than Duke Energy, The Southern Company, Constellation...all of them are the same. I have managed union tradesmen in many of them and on DOE sites and plants supporting the US Nuclear Arsenal. The entire industry is identical in this. It is not the IBEW or the United Association which causes this. In fact, the members of ALL trade unions are LOATHE to work in the industry because of it...they despise the pace...it is the most common complaint one will hear from them and is far and away the most common reason they leave and go back to the "real world".

I managed a workforce of 345 union tradesmen 6 years ago on a DOE site. That project was working 24-7-365 days a year and those tradesmen were all making 6 figures or more doing what would amount to about a days work in the "real world" in a month. A paper mill and a data center broke ground about halfway through my tenure in this position, both notorious for the grinding pace expected of tradesmen. We could not keep tradesmen on the DOE job....because by nature the work there consisted of an inordinate amount of "hurry up and wait". They left in droves to go work on jobs that were by all accounts being done on roller skates...where an electrician might run 100 feet of pipe a week at the DOE job they would do that before first break on a papermill or data center....and for the same amount of money. I have seen this happen on TVA, Southern Company and Duke Energy nukes. It is not the union nor the tradesmen, it is the industry and its propensity to climb a tree to skirt a requirement when we could stand on the ground and comply.

An example is start-up testing. Start up testing in a papermill, for example, consists of a field engineer and as many tradesman that are needed to flip switches, turn valves and read gauges and meters....and record results. In a nuclear world that all requires a committee of people, nary a one who belongs to a trade union, whose main goal in life is to find a way to skirt requirements in the misguided notion that requirements are expensive. They in turn have an independent organization check their work...also nary a union member among this group either. Of course that groups paycheck is based on keeping the first group in compliance. So they do not accept the first groups work product. This then proceeds to management to make decisions. Again, no union members involved at all. Finally, after a few rounds of this if they are highly functioning, they can involve the union members. Mind they have not consulted the fricking people who will actually being doing the work yet. When they do those people, who are charged with ensuring THEY are in compliance, almost always find major problems with the first groups work product...major problems, most a resuly of trying to skirt requirements when they could comply and get done. This means the whole thing starts all over again, the union members are told to standby and management, as management is wont to do, blames this on the union members because they are union members. If they are not they blame it on the people doing the actual work. Never mind that they can not do the work until the paperwork is right because that is the basis of a QA program, it has to be the lowest paid and last person who gets a look at the plan who is to blame.

No union at a TVA facility will take umbrage with their members working as quickly as possible. These are AFL unions, not CIO unions. 95% of them have NEVER had any sort of work action in the history of their union in any local. They are the same people who can and look forward to completely re-tooling an auto assembly plant over a 4 week period. They willingly seek out jobs working as many hours as they can find to make more money. No other industry has the issues with them that the nuclear industry has AND the nuclear industry has the same issues when they have a non-union work force. It is the industry, it is not the union or the workers. The nature of the industry is going to be slower than most...the industry's insistence that skirting requirements is better than complying compounds that slow pace exponentially. Unions and union members have NO input or control at all.

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No union at a TVA facility will take umbrage with their members working as quickly as possible.

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I can attest to that statement being 100% false.

Maybe you better speak to some of the actual workers. Nuclear, fossil fuel, or hydro. Take your pick.

Another good one goimg now is the "I'm sick" crowd because of the ash spill at Kingston.

My brother's words, and I quote. "bullshite! I walked on top of that stuff every day for 30 years."

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The plant that failed in last year's cold was a 1967 coal plant. It is slated to be replaced with a NG plant. Only 3% of TVA's power comes from wind and solar. Most is nuclear and hydro. TVA's future clean energy plans rely on NG, small nuclear reactors, solar, and wind, in that order.

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Exactamundo. Couple that with extreme and very fast temp drops with all Utilities in the Eastern US (made power trading non-existent), every utility was having issues with supplying in Dec 23.

Looks like OP needs to point on the doll where the big bad boogie man TVA touched you.

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Trash

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Name checks out.

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Looks like OP needs to point on the doll where the big bad boogie man TVA touched you

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They didn't hurt me. I said frick them and their conservation.