Bull Run Fossil Plant, commonly known as Bull Run Steam Plant, is a retired 889 megawatt ( MW), coal-fired electric generating station owned and operated by the

Tennessee Valley Authority The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolin ...

(TVA). The plant is the only coal fired power plant ever constructed by TVA with one unit, and was retired on December 1, 2023.

Location

Bull Run Plant is located on , in the Claxton community of

Anderson County, Tennessee Anderson County is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is located in the northern part of the state in East Tennessee. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, its population was 77,123. Its county seat ...

, on the north bank of Bull Run Creek, directly across the

Clinch River The Clinch River is a river that flows southwest for more than through the Great Appalachian Valley in the U.S. states of Virginia and Tennessee, gathering various tributaries, including the Powell River, before joining the Tennessee River in ...

( Melton Hill Lake) from

Oak Ridge, Tennessee Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson County, Tennessee, Anderson and Roane County, Tennessee, Roane counties in the East Tennessee, eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about west of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, Knoxville. Oak Ridge's po ...

History

Construction began on April 2, 1962 and was completed on June 12, 1967, when the plant began commercial operation. In August 2018, TVA began studying whether to retire Bull Run. On February 14, 2019, the TVA board of directors voted 5-2 to close Bull Run by December 2023, as well as the remaining coal unit at

Paradise In religion and folklore, paradise is a place of everlasting happiness, delight, and bliss. Paradisiacal notions are often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical, eschatological, or both, often contrasted with the miseries of human ...

in Kentucky by December 2020. High operational costs and low

capacity factor The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of actual electrical energy output over a given period of time to the theoretical maximum electrical energy output over that period. The theoretical maximum energy output of a given installation is def ...

were its factors in their decision. The plant was officially shut down on December 1, 2023. Operations to decommission the former plant were started shortly after the shut down. The former plant has been discussed as the location of a stellarator prototype developed by fusion energy startup Type One Energy in collaboration with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Units and operating parameters

The plant was the only single-generator coal-fired plant in the TVA system. The plant's winter net generating capacity was about 889

MWe The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named in honor o ...

. The plant consumed of coal per day, and required of cooling water per hour. Its supercritical boiler operated at a pressure of and temperature of . When the generator first went into operation, it was the largest in the world measured in terms of the volume of steam produced.

Environmental impact

In 2006, the plant ranked the 70th among the large coal-fired plants in the United States on the list of worst SO₂ polluters, having emitted of

sulfur dioxide Sulfur dioxide (IUPAC-recommended spelling) or sulphur dioxide (traditional Commonwealth English) is the chemical compound with the formula . It is a colorless gas with a pungent smell that is responsible for the odor of burnt matches. It is r ...

per

MWh A kilowatt-hour ( unit symbol: kW⋅h or kW h; commonly written as kWh) is a non-SI unit of energy equal to 3.6 megajoules (MJ) in SI units, which is the energy delivered by one kilowatt of power for one hour. Kilowatt-hours are a commo ...

of energy produced (27,987 tons of SO₂ in 2006 altogether). Since then, a wet limestone

scrubber Scrubber systems (e.g. chemical scrubbers, gas scrubbers) are a diverse group of air pollution control devices that can be used to remove some particulates and/or gases from industrial exhaust streams. An early application of a carbon dioxide scr ...

has been installed, which reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by about 95%. In 2015, the plant released 2,510,476 tons of .

References

External links