Calder Hall Nuclear Power Plant
| Calder Hall Nuclear Power Plant | ||
|---|---|---|
.jpg) |
||
| location | ||
|
||
| Coordinates | 54 ° 25 ′ 11 ″ N , 3 ° 29 ′ 31 ″ W | |
| Country: | Great Britain | |
| Data | ||
| Owner: | Nuclear Decommissioning Authority | |
| Operator: | Magnox Electric Limited | |
| Project start: | 1953 | |
| Commercial operation: | Oct 1, 1956 | |
| Shutdown: | March 31, 2003 | |
|
Decommissioned reactors (gross): |
4 (240 MW) | |
| Energy fed in since commissioning: | 56,155 GWh | |
| Was standing: | August 1, 2007 | |
| The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation . | ||
Calder Hall was the second commercial nuclear power plant (after the Obninsk nuclear power plant ). It is located on the site of the world-famous Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear complex in Cumbria in north-west England on the Irish Sea .
The decision to build the complex was taken in 1953 by the Winston Churchill government , and on October 17, 1956, it was opened by Queen Elizabeth II .
business
The project was run by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) under the code name PIPPA (Pressurized Pile Producing Power and Plutonium) to describe the civil and military purpose of the facility. The purpose of the plants in Calder Hall and the four Scottish reactors in Chapelcross was, in addition to generating electricity, the production of plutonium for British nuclear weapons .
In the beginning, the reactors at Calder Hall were primarily used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, with two fillings per year. From 1964, commercial fuel cycles were primarily used for electricity production. In April 1995 the British government announced that the production of plutonium for weapons purposes had been discontinued.
The two parts of the plant, Calder Hall A and B, each comprised two reactors of the carbon dioxide- cooled, graphite-moderated Magnox type , which was rarely used outside of Great Britain . The electrical net output of 60 megawatts each was throttled to 50 megawatts in 1973.
Calder Hall had four cooling towers because the facility required a lot of cooling water. They were built between 1950 and 1956 and were 88 meters high.
The operation of the plant was stopped on March 31, 2003 after almost half a century. At the time, Calder Hall was the longest-serving nuclear power plant in the world.
On September 29, 2007, the cooling towers fell through a controlled demolition as the first step in the dismantling of the power plant.
Data of the reactor blocks
The Calder Hall nuclear power plant has a total of four blocks :
| Reactor block | Reactor type | net power |
gross power |
start of building | Network synchronization |
Commercial operation | Shutdown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calder Hall-1 | Magnox reactor | 49 MW | 60 MW | 08/01/1953 | 08/27/1956 | 10/01/1956 | 03/31/2003 |
| Calder Hall-2 | Magnox reactor | 49 MW | 60 MW | 08/01/1953 | 02/01/1957 | 02/01/1957 | 03/31/2003 |
| Calder Hall-3 | Magnox reactor | 49 MW | 60 MW | 08/01/1955 | 03/01/1958 | 05/01/1958 | 03/31/2003 |
| Calder Hall-4 | Magnox reactor | 49 MW | 60 MW | 08/01/1955 | 04/01/1959 | 04/01/1959 | 03/31/2003 |
See also
Web links
- Sellafield Limited , operator
- Nuclear Decommissioning Authority , owner
- Nuclear Power Plant Demolished (video of the demolition of the cooling towers)