Lee Lunsford of Boilermakers Local 454 says his union has “tons of members in Bradley County” who support Project River.
“These power plants, in particular, for us, that's our bread and butter,” he told the Cleveland Daily Banner during Project River's community meeting held Saturday, Sept. 12, at the PIE Innovation Center.
Accordingly, the entire union endorses the $11.3 billion endeavor to build a natural gas plant and a biomass plant that would potentially provide power to a data center or advanced manufacturing facilities for robotics or semiconductor production.
The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers is a “group of skilled trade persons" who are “trained to build, install, and maintain boilers, nuclear reactors and other pressure vessels," according to the union’s website.
Outside the PIE Center, protestors carried signs emblazoned with messages expressing opposition to Project River.
While Lunsford said he understands local residents’ concerns about the project's effects on the environment, he said its economic benefits will result in increased wages.
“It’s going to drive competition with the current manufacturing footprint,” he said. “It's going to drive wages up because those manufacturers do not want to lose their workforce.”
The power plant will also have a TVA grid connection for an additional 360 megawatts for “peaking and backup," as described in a previous Cleveland Daily Banner article.
Trees logged from around the region will be used in the biomass process. At the power plant, tree logs will go through a dryer and chipper that will extract about 45% of their moisture content, which will be condensed back into water, which will then cool a potential data center’s infrastructure via a closed-loop system.
Electricity will be generated by steam turbines in the power plant. The 1,000-megawatt portion of the power plant will use clean-burning natural gas. The 500-megawatt portion will not be burning the wood chips produced after the drying process to generate the steam. Instead, the wood chips will be used to produce a synthetic gas that is similar to natural gas.
Timber will be harvested from within a 250-mile radius, Wright Brothers and Azure Energy representatives estimate.
The Wright Family, owners of the 850-acre parcel of land on Old Lower River Road NW, have said the project will be "one of the largest private investments in the history of East Tennessee."
It will also bring higher wages to the region.
Austin Cantrell, a spokesperson for Project River, said that, when completed, jobs at the site will pay $84,000 per job, which would be 54% above the county average of $54,610.”
In all, Project River will produce an estimated $56 million in payroll.
A local resident, Rick Waldrop, said he opposes Project River.
"I'm a lifelong conservationist and environmentalist, and I'm not in agreement with them building that here in Bradley County," he said.
During Saturday's community meeting, representatives from Wright Brothers Construction and Azure Engineering were present to answer additional questions about Project River, many of which centered on environmental concerns as well as noise produced by a possible data center, although the inclusion of such a facility has not been announced.
However, Lunsford said data centers are on the horizon for all.
“Data centers are going to be built by us or by other countries,” Lunsford said. “We've just got to accept the fact that they've got to be built.”
Lunsford said that while there are always environmental issues and concerns regarding data centers, once they are up and running, the closed-loop systems they utilize to keep data center servers cool consist of clean water.
“It's going to be clean steam coming out,” he said.
This is a developing story. Additional details will be provided in Wednesday’s print and online editions of the Cleveland Daily Banner.