The Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant is located on the Tennessee River near Decatur and Athens, Alabama, on the north side (right bank) of Wheeler Lake.

The site has three General Electric boiling water reactor (BWR) nuclear generating units and is owned entirely by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Starting in 2002, TVA undertook an effort to restore Unit 1 to operational status, spending $1.8 billion USD to do so.

At Browns Ferry, foamed plastic, covered on both sides with two coats of a flame retardant paint, was used as a firestop.

The fire spread from the temporary seal into the foamed plastic, causing significant damage to the reactor control cabling in the station.

The penetration seal originally present had been breached to install additional cables required by a design modification.

While the nuclear field went to installations of silicone foam, a wider array of firestops became prevalent in non-nuclear construction.

[citation needed] Unit 2 is a 1,259 MWe net BWR/4 built by General Electric that originally came online on August 2, 1974, and is licensed to operate through June 28, 2034.

[21] Beginning in 2005 Unit 2 was loaded with BLEU (Blended Low Enriched Uranium) recovered by the DOE from weapons programs.

Corrective actions included installing network firewalls that limit the connections and traffic to the VFD controllers.

[27] At 5:01 PM on April 27, 2011, all three reactors scrammed due to loss of external power caused by a tornado in the vicinity of the plant.

Control rod insertion and cooling procedures operated as designed with no physical damage or release of radiation.

An NRC Unusual Event, the lowest level of emergency classification, was declared due to loss of power exceeding 15 minutes.

[30] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that 5 contract workers failed to conduct roving fire watch patrols as required by NRC.

As a result, Tennessee Valley Authority was fined $140,000 for failing to maintain adequate fire watches in 2015 at Browns Ferry.

[31] The 2010 U.S. population within 10 miles (16 km) of Browns Ferry was 39,930, an increase of 12.3 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com.