Susquehanna Steam Electric Station

The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is a 2.5-gigawatt nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Susquehanna produces 63 GWh per day at 2.4 c/kWh, partly to an adjacent data center campus. It is located near the Susquehanna River in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Operations Susquehanna Station Nuclear, a division of Talen Energy, serves as 90% owner and operator of the 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 1,075 acres (435 ha), 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 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 at 300 MW 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; 840—1,200 MW in 2029 and 1,680—1,920 MW in 2032, continuing to 2042. The power increase depends on Amazon's expansion of the data center. The energy has an expected value of $18 billion. 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 On August 30, 2016, Talen Energy formally requested the license application be withdrawn, and the NRC officially accepted the application withdrawal on September 22, 2016, officially cancelling the project.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 miles (16 km), concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 miles (80 km), concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U.S. population within 10 miles (16 km) 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 miles (80 km) 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. See also List of largest power stations in the United States References External links DoE Page