RE Ginna nuclear power plant

RE Ginna nuclear power plant
location
Coordinates	43 ° 16 '40 "  N , 77 ° 18' 32"  W Coordinates: 43 ° 16 '40 "  N , 77 ° 18' 32"  W.
Country:	United States
Data
Owner:	Exelon
Operator:	Exelon
The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The Robert Emmett Ginna nuclear power plant , widely known as Ginna (emphasis: gun-NAY) is located on the south bank of Lake Ontario near Ontario ( Wayne County ), in the US state of New York , about 20 miles east of Rochester . Ginna is one of the oldest nuclear power plants in the United States still on the grid. It was on December 2, 1969 to the network and consists of a single pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse , of those in Point Beach , Kewaunee , and Prairie Iceland is similar.

The reactor

There is a special feature of the reactor design: the reactor dome is built with walls on the sides, while the roof is open. If you look at the reactor building from the sides, it looks like a large, windowless factory hall, similar to the numerous General Electric boiling water reactors, which, however, have covered reactor buildings. The dome of the pressurized water reactor can only be seen from the air through the open roof. Built-on pressurized water reactors with rectangular reactor buildings are generally an exception, a dome or cylinder shape is the rule. In the USA, only Unit 2 in the Millstone nuclear power plant and the two reactor blocks in the Point Beach nuclear power plant still have this design.

The power plant was named after Robert Emmett Ginna (1902-1996), a former chairman of the board of directors of Rochester Gas & Electric, who was one of the first promoters of nuclear power as a power generation resource in the United States. As a tribute to his Irish origins, Ginna had the power station painted green.

Ginna is owned and operated by CENG after the company acquired the power plant from Rochester Gas and Electric in 2004. After Constellation Energy was bought in March 2012, its new parent company , Exelon , is the new owner of the power plant.

Incidents

Ginna was the site of a nuclear accident on January 25, 1982 after a steam generator heating pipe broke and a relatively small amount of radioactive vapor was released into the area. The leak lasted for 93 minutes and led to emergency cooling because the leakage loss of primary circuit cooling water had to be compensated for. The break was caused by an object accidentally left in the steam generator during maintenance. This was not the first time a pipe ruptured in an American nuclear reactor, but the proximity to the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant has drawn considerable attention to the incident at the Ginna nuclear power plant. A total of 485.3 curies of noble gas and 1.15 millicuries of iodine-131 were released, and the reactor lost 64 hectoliters of contaminated water.

In 1996 the two original Westinghouse steam generators were replaced by two new ones from Babcock & Wilcox , including the replacement of the steam generator, which was damaged in 1982 and then repaired. This project made it possible to increase the capacity of the reactor a few years later and was a major factor in the approval of a 20-year extension (originally until 2009).

Future of the power plant

Due to the expansion of renewable energies and increased fracking , electricity prices in the Upstate New York region have fallen from $ 55 per megawatt hour to $ 32. Similar developments in other regions had previously led to decisions to shut down nuclear power plants such as Kewaunee or Vermont Yankee in 2013 . Since the unit in Ginna has comparatively little output, is old and single and is making losses, Mark Cooper sees it in his report as one of the 12 American nuclear power plants that are most likely to be shut down in the coming years.

After the operator did public relations work to maintain the power plant and months of negotiations, an agreement was reached that will allow Ginna to continue operating until March 2017. At this point, a new power line should be completed, thanks to which Ginna can be replaced. For this purpose, the operator is to receive 15.42 million US dollars per month from RG&E , which will be added to the electricity price for electricity customers. Should the electricity prices not have risen by then - as the current situation on the electricity market indicates - the reactor would then be shut down.

Surrounding population

The US nuclear regulatory agency has established two emergency zones around nuclear power plants: A restricted zone must be set up within a 10-mile radius in order to prevent the population from coming into contact with the radioactive cloud. Restrictions on radioactively contaminated food and water are to be imposed within a 50 mile radius.

In 2010, 66,847 people lived within a 10-mile radius of the nuclear power plant, 12.7 percent more than ten years earlier. In the same year, 1,269,589 people lived within a 50-mile radius, 2.1 percent more than 2000. There are cities such as Rochester (17 miles from the city center) within a 50-mile radius of the power plant. The Canadian population is not included in these figures.

Earthquake risk

The US nuclear regulatory authority estimates the annual risk of a major earthquake that could damage the reactor core, according to a study from August 2010 at 1 in 76,923.

Operating license

In the USA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) grants an operating license for a nuclear power plant for a period of up to 40 years. The 40 year period was originally based on the fixed asset depreciation period . The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allows the operating license to be extended (even several times) by 20 years at a time.

The original operating license was granted to the then operator RE Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, LLC on September 19, 1969 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It was extended on May 19, 2004 to September 18, 2029.

Data of the reactor blocks

The Ginna nuclear power plant has one power plant unit:

Reactor block	Reactor type	Net power	Gross output	start of building	Network synchronization	Commercial operation	operating permit	Shutdown
Ginna	Pressurized water reactor	560 MW	608 MW	April 25, 1966	2nd December 1969	July 1, 1970	09/18/2029

Web links

Commons : RE Ginna nuclear power plant  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• DoE Page
• REGinna homepage
• Photo of the power plant

See also

• List of nuclear power plants

Individual evidence

1. ^ Brochure nuclear technology , C. Hanser Verlag, 1996
2. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/19/us/robert-ginna-94-a-champion-of-nuclear-power.html
3. ↑ http://www.exeloncorp.com/PowerPlants/re_ginna/Pages/profile.aspx
4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-10-18/the-world-s-10-oldest-operating-nuclear-power-reactors-.html#slide4
6. ↑ http://www.exeloncorp.com/assets/energy/powerplants/docs/Ginna/Ginna%20RSSA%20Facts%202015.pdf
7. ↑ http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2015/10/8580543/deal-reached-fate-western-new-york-nuclear-facility Deal reached on fate of Western New York nuclear facility, Capital New York from November 23, 2015
8. ↑ http://www.rtoinsider.com/ginna-rge-settlement-18657 Ginna Lifeline to End in 2017; Profitable Operation Afterwards 'Unlikely', RTO Insider dated November 23, 2015
9. ^ Backgrounder on Reactor License Renewal. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), accessed August 18, 2016 . 
10. ^ Subsequent License Renewal Background. NRC, accessed August 18, 2016 . 
11. ^ RE Ginna Nuclear Power Plant. NRC, accessed August 18, 2016 . 
12. ↑ https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=609