TVA brings down Hartsville’s cooling tower

The Tennessee Valley Authority has posted a video of the implosion of a 1970s-era, 540-foot-tall hyperbolic cooling tower at its Hartsville site in Tennessee, which once was to have hosted a nuclear power plant. The tower crashed to the ground at the hands of a demolition crew on September 18 as part of TVA's actions to get rid of old, obsolete, and unused structures in the Tennessee Valley region and make room for future projects that are expected to add more than 6,200 megawatts of power.

Fast-growing region: According to TVA, the region's population is growing faster than the national average, and new electricity-generating capacity is required to replace retiring and expiring capacity and support continued economic growth. With TVA's plans for the future in mind, the demolition team has been working to remove unneeded structures at other sites in the region, including the Bull Run coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tenn., and the Paradise combined cycle/combustion turbine plant in Kentucky. Once cleared, the sites will be ready for eventual new projects.

Safety and recycling: In 1972, in the midst of rapid expansion, TVA ordered the 4-unit Hartsville nuclear power plant. By 1984, however, plans for all four units had been canceled.

The Unit A1 cooling tower-built in the late 1970s and the only one that neared completion-was the most visible sign of TVA's abandoned plans for Hartsville. In addition to making way for future projects, it was removed for another reason: It was attracting unauthorized visitors and posed a public safety risk.

"Removing the cooling tower not only eliminates a safety risk, it's also part of our effort to remove obsolete infrastructure and prepare sites for any future opportunities," said Jayme Hobson, general manager of the demolition team. "We're also putting the materials from the cooling tower to good use." The concrete from the tower will be ground into small pieces to be used to improve heavy equipment storage at another location on the property. Even smaller pieces of concrete will be recycled and used to make a gravel lot on the site. The steel from the tower is also being recycled for other purposes.

Future opportunities: TVA has no immediate plans for redevelopment of the cooling tower area, though the company noted that it "continuously evaluates its properties to support future opportunities that align with its mission." As of now, parts of the Hartsville site are being used for such support purposes as satellite office space for employees and staging areas for heavy equipment.