bellefonte

Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Jackson County. (TVA photo)

(Chas Law)

The numbers can dazzle: 2,000 permanent, high-paying jobs and up to another 4,000 temporary construction jobs.

That's the plan spelled out Monday by Nuclear Holdings LLC after submitting the winning bid of $111 million for mothballed Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in northeast Alabama.

Located in Hollywood, less than 10 minutes northeast of Scottsboro in Jackson County, Bellefonte has long teased the region of economic prosperity with its two giant cooling towers dominating the horizon. But that prosperity has never been realized because the plant, which began construction in the 1970s, has never been finished.

Now there is another plan, another reason for hope for an economically-struggling community that needs the promise of that to ultimately be realized.

"It's kind of a believe-it-when-I-see-it thing," Scottsboro Mayor Melton Potter told AL.com. "But this is a positive step, I think."

TVA, which owns the unfinished plant and the 1,300 acres upon which it sits, announced in May it would put the site up for auction. The federally-owned utility had deemed the plant excess inventory and said it could adequately meet the demand for power without Bellefonte.

That auction process reached its conclusion Monday with the $111 million bid - triple the minimum bid price of $36.4 million set by TVA.

"It's good for Jackson County, it's good for north Alabama and it's good for TVA," said Joe Ritch, executive director of the TVA board.

But Bellefonte has made promises before, most recently in 2011 when the board voted to complete the plant and bring it online. As demand for power plateaued, though, TVA abandoned those plans and, now five years later, sold the plant.

For now, only 39 people work at the Bellefonte facility.

"For them to spend that kind of money, they're serious about finishing it as a nuclear power plant," said Dus Rogers, who recently retired as president of the Jackson County Economic Development Association. "I think it's a huge investment, a good investment and a good influx of jobs. A lot of construction jobs that are good jobs, plus a lot of good jobs when they finish it."

Said Potter, "We were really excited several years ago when the TVA board voted to finish it. Yeah, I'm excited about it. But the proof is going to be in the pudding. When you see the folks coming in here and the jobs that are created.

"But I have confidence in this group. I have confidence in Mr. Haney and this group and the work he has done all over the country. He's been interested in this for a long time."

Nuclear Development LLC, owned by the Haney family of Chattanooga, said in a press release distributed just seconds after TVA declared their bid to be the winner that it planned to invest up to $13 billion into finishing Bellefonte as a nuclear plant.

Members of the Haney family left the facility immediately after the auction and did not speak to reporters.

"Today marks the first step of an exciting new journey for the people of Alabama and Tennessee," Franklin Haney said in that press release. "The Bellefonte Nuclear Station will help transform communities across the region - many of which have been hit hard by the forced closure of coal power plants over the last decade.

"This project will bring new life to the region by creating thousands of jobs while providing assured access to reliable, affordable, zero-emission energy."

In a brief phone interview with AL.com after the auction, Haney said his company's plan was to be a power producer throughout the southeast.

If this hope becomes reality, Jackson County could use it. The county's median household income, from 2010-2014, was just $36,874. That trails the statewide average of $43,511, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

And while the state saw 14,054 building permits for privately-owned housing units issued in 2015, only 40 of those permits (less than one-tenth of 1 percent) were in Jackson County, according to the Census.

In September, the county unemployment rate was 6.1 percent while the statewide rate was 5.4 percent, according to the Alabama Department of Labor.

"I'm a glass-half-full kind of person," said Rick Roden, president/CEO of the Greater Jackson County Chamber of Commerce. "They've made an announcement they're going to purchase it and the way I'm going to look at it, if they're going to purchase it and complete it, there's going to be lots of construction jobs, lots of permanent jobs and that's the way I'll look at it until something else happens.

"And hopefully the next thing that happens, they open it up as a nuclear plant."

The Bellefonte auction comes about 16 months after Google announced plans to build a data center on the grounds of the now-shuttered Widows Creek Steam Plant, which TVA closed last year as part of a larger plan to move away from coal-fired plants.

"You add the Google project and this project together, we could see explosive growth, which is what we would love to see," Roden said. "We would much rather deal with growth problems than high unemployment problems."