He was an engineer, a lawyer, and a mighty warrior for green energy, who helped shut down some two dozen nuclear powerplants, not counting the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which he famously called a "technological turkey," helping President Jimmy Carter kill the project. (As a 20 year old junior staffer in Senator Jim Sasser's office, I privately agreed with his recommendation and wrote a seven page memo to the junior Senator).
In 1978, national journalists encouraged me and gave me money to investigate TVA, long a liberal sacred cow. (The Fund for Investigative Journalism board had one skeptic, James Jackson Kilpatrick, who told Howard Bray that I had "split an infinitive" in my application. I promptly learned my lesson and remain a fanatic on grammar).
While SDF liked sparring with me and no doubt considered us to be adversaries, 1978-1983, I respected his skills and vision.
I talked to SDF once or twice by telephone in 1977, as a junior staffer for the junior Senator from Tennessee, James R. Sasser. SDF wrote Jimmy Carter's energy plan. Freeman did not respond well to suggestions, as in how we should encourage waste heat utilization, or deal with coal oligopoly. He essentially wanted Congress to do what every Presidential staffer asks, "Trust us." We didn't, leading to section 742 of the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978, thank God, leading to exposure of land monopoly and tax avoidance in 80 counties in six states, thanks to $100,000 granted to a university in western North Carolina, working with Highlander Center.
I met SDF at his twelfth floor office in TVA Towers in 1978, as a Georgetown undergraduate on a Fund For Investigative Journalism grant, investigating United States Senate Republican Leader Howard Henry Baker, Jr. and TVA's strange romance with Northeast Tennessee coal barons who mined coal on Baker's family land and sold it to TVA -- "no conflict of interest" ruled timid TVA Assistant General Counsel Lynn Morehouse, because Baker owned the land, not the coal companies.
I informed him of the corruption of his coal buying officials, discussing $300,000,000 in price-fixed coal purchased under Requisition 42. Our discussion was only moments after his Exec, Dave Powell, another former TVA lawyer, said to me, "Welcome to the Ponderosa," proceeding to inform me that "40,000 TVA employees hate your guts."
When I told Freeman Powell was only one of 40,000 and that his staff were traitors to TVA's vision, and that the TVA "can't penetrate" and make people obey the law, he was angry. Chairman Freeman. abruptly signed a copy of his book for me (Energy: the New Era) by writing only "Dave Freeman," without the usual dedicatory remarks. Later, Freeman told Pulitzer Prize winning Nashville Tennessean investigative Nat Caldwell that "Ed Slavin is the biggest smart-ass I ever met in my entire life." Nat told me Freeman should look in a mirror.
Meanwhile, in 1981, GAO agreed with my findings. See General Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) report here, TVA's Coal Procurement Practices--More Effective Management Needed, EMD-81-65 (August 14, 1981)
As Appalachian Observer Editor, 1981-1983, I went to TVA board meetings at least once a month, asking questions, demanding answers, and expecting democracy. Even at TVA's 50th anniversary fete, I was asking about its dictatorial ways, which led U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to compare this "socialist' New Deal agency to the worst of Soviet central planning bodies. TVA virtually invented strip-mining, by its cynical misinterpretation of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.
Once Chairman Freeman said, "Ed, is that another of your 'have you stopped beating your wife yet' questions?" But he always answered citizen and reporter questions.
After Freeman, intelligent questions and answers and the idea of dialogue was eliminated inn favor of "public listening sessions" under the suzerainty of Reagan's and Bush's TVA Chairs, like wooden Marvin Runyon, a former Nissan USA exec who went on to boss and bully the Postal Service. Instead of answering questions, they'd sit there on their behinds, silent, like showroom dummies.
Nevertheless, I persisted.
By 1983, my case against the combined powers of fetid federal agencies in East Tennessee led to the declassification of the largest mercury pollution event in world history. TVA Chairman S. David Freeman and TVA responded furiously, with Chairman Freeman stating "there's a damned coverup out in Oak Ridge."
Freeman successfully shut down construction on nuclear power plants, spoke out about electric cars and solar energy, was featured in documentaries, and became the wise man of energy policy.
I saw him one other time after our July 11, 1983 investigative hearing before then-Reps. Al Gore, Jr. and Marilyn Lloyd. As a first year law student in Memphis, my housemates and I found ourselves billed for a disconnection fee when we'd never had a power account with Memphis Light Gas & Water before. So I got a copy of the TVA-MLGW contract, showed up at a board meeting, cited the law and asked for a refund, duly reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Freeman teased me, asking if my power had been shut off, but I could almost detect affection or respect in his voice.
At a critical time in our Nation's history, during the depths of the Reagan Administration, when pollution was exposed through declassification procedures, and the entire future of the nuclear weapons complex was on the line, S. David Freeman spoke out for righteousness.
It turns out, DoE had never told TVA it was polluting East Fork Poplar Creek, Clinch River and Tennessee River with its witches' brew of toxic and radioactive chemicals, emitted by the notorious Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant, now renamed the "Y-12 National Security Complex."
Thus, TVA as an organization felt betrayed by DoE and its predecessors, the Atomic Energy Commission, Energy Research and Development Administration, and their malfeasant murderous contractor, Union Carbide Corporation.
From The Washington Post:
S. David Freeman, green-energy champion who advised presidents, dies at 94
By
May 13, 2020 at 8:34 p.m. EDT
Long before climate change became a global focus, Mr. Freeman was also a crusader for clean energy, promoting wind turbines, solar panels and the development of electric cars and transportation systems. “The planet,” he declared in 1992, “cannot afford the continued or increased production of coal or oil.”
Mr. Freeman faced enduring criticism for his opposition to nuclear power, which he deemed unsafe, unnecessary and uneconomical, and for a management style described as brash and abrasive. But by 2001, when he was enlisted to negotiate California’s long-term electricity contracts and help the state out of an energy crisis, he was arguably the country’s preeminent leader, and champion, of public utilities.
“It’s time the words ‘public power’ are pronounced again in public,” he told the Times. “It was public power that turned the lights on in rural America. Not too many people are alive today who know that. We’ve had electricity in the whole country for 50 years, but not much more than that.”
As a boy in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mr. Freeman had watched President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicate the Chickamauga Dam as part of the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which brought cheap electricity to much of Appalachia. He later launched his career as an engineer and then lawyer with the authority, before following his boss to Washington in 1961 to join the Federal Power Commission.
Mr. Freeman worked in the Johnson, Nixon and Carter White Houses, helping to shape the federal government’s energy policies at a time when the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy were being created.
He also advised the Senate Commerce Committee on fuel-efficiency standards and oversaw the Ford Foundation report “A Time to Choose” (1974), which advanced many of his views on energy efficiency. The report impressed politicians including President Jimmy Carter, who appointed Mr. Freeman to the board of the TVA, the country’s largest public utility, and named him chairman in 1978.
At the time, the authority was working on a host of nuclear power-plant projects and had built a set of coal plants that were reportedly the nation’s worst source of air pollution. Mr. Freeman declared that he wanted to “hook TVA customers to the sun” and “make the valley the Detroit of electric vehicles,” and over the next few years he stopped the development of eight nuclear reactors and installed $1 billion worth of pollution controls on the TVA’s coal plants.
The National Wildlife Federation named him conservationist of the year, although rate increases under his leadership angered many of the authority’s roughly 7 million customers. President Ronald Reagan appointed a new chairman in 1981, and after Mr. Freeman’s term on the board expired in 1984 he spent much of the next two decades in charge of public utilities across the country.
Mr. Freeman led the Austin-based Lower Colorado River Authority, where he quashed plans to build a lignite mine; the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, where he was credited with steadying the utility’s finances after voters elected to close a nuclear power plant; and the New York Power Authority, the largest public power agency outside the federal government.
In 1997 he took over the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, where he was credited with cutting the agency’s $8 billion debt by half without raising rates. When an energy crisis rattled the state four years later, he was criticized by Republican politicians who said he had gouged state ratepayers when his Los Angeles department, which had ample electricity, profited from selling power to other utilities.
“I’ve been called a lot of bad things,” Mr. Freeman told E&E News, an energy and environment publication, in 2018. “I was called a socialist in the Nixon administration for pushing energy efficiency. I don’t feel like I’m making my case if I don’t have somebody pissed off at me.”
The older of two children, Simon David Freeman was born in Chattanooga on Jan. 14, 1926. His father, an umbrella repairman, was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who arrived at Ellis Island, consulted an atlas and moved to Chattanooga because he “saw that it rained a lot there,” Stan Freeman said.
Dave Freeman, as he was known, served in the Merchant Marine during World War II and studied civil engineering at Georgia Tech, then known as the Georgia School of Technology. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1948 and graduated from law school at the University of Tennessee in 1956, after an initial stint working on power plants for the TVA.
His marriages to Marianne Cohn, Anne Crawford and Suzanne Kennedy ended in divorce. Survivors include three children from his first marriage, Anita Hopkins of Reston, Stan Freeman of Bethesda, Md., and Roger Freeman of Denver; a brother; nine grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
In his 80s, Mr. Freeman led an effort to clean up air pollution at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., and served as deputy mayor for energy and the environment in Los Angeles. He was still making headlines until shortly before his death, criticizing the TVA for not doing more to take advantage of wind and solar power and calling on fellow environmentalists to take action.
“What concerns me is the absolute failure of the Democratic Party or environmental movement to tell my grandchildren what we’re for,” he told E&E News. “What is the green agenda today? To bellyache about [President] Trump? It’s not good enough. Mother Nature doesn’t give a damn to what you say. It depends on what you do.”
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