Susquehanna Steam Electric Station

Operations

Susquehanna Station Nuclear, a division of Talen Energy, serves as 90% owner and operator of the 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. PPL operated the plant until June 2015 when Talen Energy was formed from PPL's competitive supply business. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building on a site of 1075 acre, with approximately 900 employees working on site and additional support employees in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg-based Allegheny Electric Cooperative purchased 10% of the plant in 1977.

The station has been in operation since 1983. The prime builder was Bechtel Power Corporation of Reston, Virginia. In November 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) extended the operation licenses of the reactors for an additional 20 years{{cite web | access-date= 2009-11-25 }} and the station has received additional license extensions since then with Unit 1 licensed through 2042 and Unit 2 through 2044.

Data center

Cumulus Data, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, developed a data center campus directly connected to the Susquehanna plant. On January 17, 2023, it completed the phase 1 construction. On March 4, 2024, it was sold to Amazon Web Services for 650 million dollars. As part of the transaction, the Susquehanna station will provide power to the data center campus.

Electricity production

Abandoned plans for an adjacent power plant

In 2008, PPL filed an application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build and operate a new nuclear plant under consideration near Berwick, Pennsylvania. The Bell Bend Nuclear Power Plant would be built near the company’s existing two-unit Susquehanna nuclear power plant. On August 30, 2016, Talen Energy formally requested the license application be withdrawn,{{cite web | access-date= 2017-12-19 }} and the NRC officially accepted the application withdrawal on September 22, 2016,{{cite web | access-date= 2017-12-19 }} officially cancelling the project. Unlike the existing two units, which are American-designed boiling water reactors, the plan called for the French-German EPR which is a pressurized water reactor. At 1.6 Gigawatt net electric nameplate capacity (1.66 GW in the case of Taishan nuclear power plant), the EPR is the nuclear power plant design with the highest per-reactor electric power output ever built.

Incidents

In the plant's first emergency, an electrical fire erupted at a switch box that controls the supply of cooling water to emergency systems. No injuries were reported following the 1982 incident.

Roughly 10,000 gallons of mildly radioactive water spilled at the Station's Unit 1 turbine building after a gasket failed in the filtering system in 1985. No radiation was released from the building to the public, and no personnel were contaminated as a result of this incident.

Surrounding population

The NRC defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 10 mi, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 mi, concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity.

The 2010 U.S. population within 10 mi of Susquehanna was 54,686, an increase of 3.3 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within 50 mi was 1,765,761, an increase of 5.5 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Wilkes-Barre (18 miles to city center) and the larger city, Scranton (33 miles to center city).

Seismic risk

The NRC's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Susquehanna was 1 in 76,923, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

References

References

1. "EIA - State Nuclear Profiles".
2. (November 2, 2015). "U.S. boiling-water reactors with "Mark 1" and "Mark 2" containments". NRC.
3. "At a Glance". Pplweb.com.
4. "PPL Susquehanna Fact Sheet". Pplweb.com.
5. (January 17, 2023). "Cumulus Data Completes Key Milestones in Construction of its Flagship Zero-Carbon Susquehanna Data Center Campus".
6. (March 4, 2024). "Talen Energy Announces Sale of Zero-Carbon Data Center Campus".
7. (March 4, 2024). "AWS acquires Talen's nuclear data center campus in Pennsylvania".
8. "Electricity Data Browser".
9. (September 22, 1982). "Nuke plant has emergency". Reading Eagle.
10. (October 28, 1985). "Radioactive water spills at nuke plant". Gainesville Sun.
11. "NRC: Emergency Planning Zones".
12. (2011-04-14). "Nuclear neighbors: Population rises near US reactors".
13. (2011-03-16). "What are the odds? US nuke plants ranked by quake risk".
14. "Archived copy".