Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station
Beaver Valley Power Station is a nuclear power plant on the Ohio River covering near Shippingport, Pennsylvania, United States, roughly northwest of Pittsburgh. The Beaver Valley plant is operated by Energy Harbor and power is generated by two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. FirstEnergy announced that it expected to close Beaver Valley in 2021 without legislative relief or sale to another utility company. More recently, however, FirstEnergy announced that because of the Governor Tom Wolf's decision to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative the company intends to keep the facility in operation. Surrounding population. The  Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of , concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about , concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U.S. population within of Beaver Valley was 114,514, a decrease of 6.6 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within was 3,140,766, a decrease of 3.7 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Pittsburgh (27 miles  away, located upriver from the station). Seismic risk. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Beaver Valley was Reactor 1: 1 in 20,833; Reactor 2: 1 in 45,455, according to an NRC study published in August 2010. Fessenheim. Beaver Valley 1 was used as the reference design for the French nuclear plant at Fessenheim.