Saint-Alban nuclear power plant

Saint-Alban nuclear power plant
location
Coordinates	45 ° 24 '17 "  N , 4 ° 45' 21"  E Coordinates: 45 ° 24 '17 "  N , 4 ° 45' 21"  E
Country:	France
Data
Owner:	EDF
Operator:	EDF
Project start:	1st January 1979
Commercial operation:	March 30, 1985
Active reactors (gross):	2 (2762 MW)
Energy fed in in 2006:	16,466 GWh
Energy fed in since commissioning:	318,016 GWh
Website:	www.edf.fr
Was standing:	July 22, 2007
The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The Saint-Alban Nuclear Power Plant is in the French commune of Saint-Alban-du-Rhône in the region of Auvergne Rhône-Alpes in Isère on the left bank of the Rhone about 50 kilometers south of Lyon . The nuclear power plant consists of two pressurized water reactors .

Key data

The nuclear power plant employs around 670 people and is operated by the French company Électricité de France (EDF). Water from the Rhône is used for cooling. The entire power plant area has an area of ​​180 hectares .

The two pressurized water reactors have a net power of each of 1335  megawatts (MW) and a gross power of 1381 MW. The total installed capacity is 2762 MW; this makes the nuclear power plant one of the middle ones in France. Every year it feeds an average of 18 billion kilowatt hours into the public power grid ; this corresponds to around 13 percent of the annual electricity consumption of the Rhône-Alpes region and four to five percent of the French consumption.

Construction of the first reactor block began on January 29, 1979 and went into operation on March 30, 1985. Construction of the second reactor block began on July 31, 1979, and commissioning was on July 3, 1986. The construction of two further reactor blocks was discarded during the planning phase.

safety

In the event of a strong earthquake , the emergency cooling could fail. According to a report by the French nuclear supervisory authority, the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN), dated October 3, 2002, the functionality of a safety-relevant valve that is supposed to ensure that the reactor blocks cool down could not be ensured in this case . The operating company EDF informed ASN of this on August 5, 2002.

In July 2008, according to a report by the daily Le Figaro, 15 employees were radioactively contaminated during inspection work . The operator of the plant announced that the specialists were "only slightly" exposed to radiation. Due to the earlier incidents in French nuclear power plants in July 2008, including in Tricastin , the incident attracted above-average media coverage.

Data of the reactor blocks

The Saint-Alban nuclear power plant has a total of two blocks :

Reactor block	Reactor type	net power	gross power	start of building	Network synchronization	Commercialization of essential operation	switching off processing
Saint-Alban-1	Pressurized water reactor	1335 MW	1381 MW	January 29, 1979	August 30, 1985	May 1, 1986
Saint-Alban-2	Pressurized water reactor	1335 MW	1381 MW	July 31, 1979	3rd July 1986	March 1, 1987

See also

• List of nuclear facilities in France
• List of nuclear power plants

Web links

• The nuclear power plant on the side of the operator (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Power Reactor Information System of the IAEA : "France (French Republic): Nuclear Power Reactors" (English)
2. ↑ Energy Chronicle - French nuclear power plants not earthquake-proof
3. ↑ 15 people contaminated in France ( Memento from July 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Financial Times Deutschland, July 22, 2008