Browns Ferry Restart

The successful restart of Alabama's first nuclear reactor in May 2007 capped a five-year project that included engineering and technical services provided by Bechtel, the U.S. leader in building and modernizing nuclear power plants.
 
Browns Ferry Unit 1 in Athens, Alabama, is the first nuclear reactor to come into service since 1996, when Watts Bar Unit 1 came on line in Spring City, Tennessee.
 
Owned by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Unit 1 had been dormant since 1985, when TVA took its units off line to fix management and operational issues. It was restarted with a capacity of 1,155 megawatts, enough to light 650,000 homes with no contribution to global warming.
   
Bechtel Power previously worked on the restart of Units 2 and 3 at Browns Ferry in the early 1990s. In 2002, the company signed an agreement with TVA to help restore Unit 1. Bechtel provided detailed engineering, technical services, system testing, and start-up work for the $1.8 billion endeavor, one of the largest and most complex of its kind.
 
At the start of the project, Bechtel Power quickly assembled more than 500 engineers from inside and outside the company and developed an engineer mentoring program to integrate new employees. A Bechtel-TVA team developed a comprehensive database of all component and system work to track the project and keep it on schedule. The project included installation of some 150 miles of new cable and more than 6 miles of piping.