Caorso nuclear power plant

location

Coordinates

45 ° 4 '20 " N , 9 ° 52' 20" E Coordinates: 45 ° 4 '20 " N , 9 ° 52' 20" E

Country:

Italy

Data

Owner:

Società gestione impianti nucleari

Operator:

Società gestione impianti nucleari

Project start:

1969

Commercial operation:

Dec. 1, 1981

Shutdown:

July 1, 1990

Decommissioned reactors (gross):

1 (882 MW)

Energy fed in since commissioning:

27,726 GWh

Was standing:

October 16, 2009

The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The decommissioned Caorso nuclear power plant ( Italian Centrale nucleare di Caorso ) is located near Caorso , Piacenza province , Italy . The current owner and operator is the Società gestione impianti nucleari (SOGIN). It went into operation in 1978 as the fourth and last nuclear power plant in Italy. In 1990, after the referendum of 1987 regulating Italy's nuclear phase-out , it was shut down as one of the last two of the four nuclear power plants that had been in operation in Italy up to that point.

Reactor and containment

The nuclear power station Caorso consisted of a boiling water reactor of General Electric with a net capacity of 860 MW and a gross output of 882 MW. Thus it was by far the most powerful nuclear power plant in Italy.

The Caorso containment was a construction unique in Europe, which was otherwise only built in the USA and Japan. It was a so-called Mark II containment, a further development by General Electric, which showed some improvements compared to the previously built Mark I containment (used in Europe at the Santa María de Garoña nuclear power plant and the Mühleberg nuclear power plant ). With the Mark I, for example, a core meltdown could in the worst case (insufficient accident cooling) spread quickly to the containment wall and melt it through. In the case of the Mark II, care was taken to ensure that the liquid core meltdown, after it had melted through and left the reactor vessel, firstly flows into a relatively deep concrete pit and, secondly, as it spreads out on the sump floor, into dozens of vertically downwardly directed so-called transfer pipes and through them into the water-filled condensation chamber spreading underneath falls and cools down. This makes it very unlikely that the containment wall will melt through. After the above-mentioned concrete pit with a floor that is more than one meter thick, the remainder of the melt also falls into the condensation chamber and is cooled there, which means that the containment floor is unlikely to melt through. However, certain other potential containment failure mechanisms are still in place.

history

It was built from January 1, 1970 and was critical for the first time on December 31, 1977 . The reactor was first synchronized with the power grid on May 23, 1978. On December 1, 1981, the power plant went into commercial operation. In 1986 it was used for the last time to generate electricity. This year the second highest electricity production was achieved with 5300 GWh after 1982 with 5733 GWh. After the Chernobyl disaster , after a scheduled shutdown on October 25, 1986, the nuclear power plant was not started up to carry out the fourth fuel element replacement and was shut down for political reasons. The reactor was finally shut down on July 1, 1990 as a result of the Italian nuclear phase-out. According to the current status, the decommissioning work has progressed so far that the reactor can no longer be commissioned. 1,880 cubic meters of radioactive waste and 1,032 spent fuel elements were produced, which corresponds to a weight of 187 tons.

In the spring of 2010, a General Electric manager suggested stopping the dismantling and reactivating the nuclear power plant. However, on June 12 and 13, 2011, in a referendum on the re-entry into nuclear power, with a participation of 57%, 94.1% of the voters voted against the re-entry.