Saint Lucie Nuclear Power Plant

Saint Lucie Nuclear Power Plant
location
Coordinates	27 ° 20 '55 "  N , 80 ° 14' 47"  W Coordinates: 27 ° 20 '55 "  N , 80 ° 14' 47"  W.
Country:	United States
Data
Owner:	Florida Power & Light
Operator:	Florida Power & Light
Project start:	1967
Commercial operation:	March 1, 1976
Active reactors (gross):	2 (1678 MW)
Energy fed in in 2009:	13,275 GWh
Energy fed in since commissioning:	362,146 GWh
Website:	The nuclear power plant on the homepage of the operator (English)
Was standing:	December 23, 2010
The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The Saint Lucie nuclear power plant is located on Hutchinson Island near Port St. Lucie , St. Lucie County in the US state of Florida . Both blocks are pressurized water reactors from Combustion Engineering .

The plant has been operated by Florida Power & Light since 1976 .

The plant's two reactors are housed in two different buildings. The system has no cooling towers , but is cooled with sea water.

history

Construction of the first reactor block began on July 1, 1970. Construction on the other block began on May 2, 1977. The first reactor became critical for the first time on May 7, 1976 . The second reactor block followed on June 13, 1983. On December 21, 1976, the first and on August 8, 1983 the second reactor block went into commercial operation.

In October 2003, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) extended the operating license for both units by 20 years until 2036 and 2043. In addition, the NRC agreed in 2012 to increase the output of both reactors by 12%.

On July 12, 2015, recreational diver Christopher Le Cun, while diving off the coast, got into a cooling water inlet pipe of the nuclear power plant and was flushed into a cooling water pond on the site of the NPP. In the spring of 2016, he then filed a lawsuit against the power plant operator because he had not adequately secured the inlet. The power plant operator contradicted this and referred to an existing cover at the inlet and a warning buoy, which requires a minimum distance of 30 m. He accused Le Cun of being deliberately submerged in the tube. In 1989 the diver William Lamm is said to have also been sucked in at the same place.

In December 2016 it became known that Saint Lucie was also affected by the Creusot Forge scandal over falsified certificates. Parts of the pressurizer in Block 1 originate from the Areva subsidiary who has been burdened .

Disruptions

• From February 26, 1983 to May 16, 1984, Saint-Lucie-1 was out of service after damage to the heat shield of the reactor pressure vessel and other components was discovered.

• In March 2012, a special inspection took place in St. Lucie as a result of the flooding problem in the Fukushima nuclear disaster , but it was "overlooked" that some of the many seals on the building with the emergency cooling systems were leaking. In January 2014, as a result of these leaky seals, this building was flooded with 50,000 gallons of water from heavy rainfall . The operating team discovered the problem in good time and diverted the water through valves into building sumps, from where it could be pumped out. The emergency cooling systems apparently remained functional. In November 2014, the regulatory authority NRC intensified the supervision of the nuclear power plant due to this incident.

• In 2016 St. Lucie Power was shut down because of Hurricane Matthew , in 2017 because of Hurricane Irma

Data of the reactor blocks

The Saint Lucie nuclear power plant has two blocks :

Reactor block	Reactor type	net power	gross power	start of building	Network synchronization	Commercialization of essential operation	switching off processing
Saint Lucie-1	Pressurized water reactor	839 MW	883 MW	07/01/1970	05/07/1976	December 21, 1976
Saint Lucie-2	Pressurized water reactor	839 MW	883 MW	05/02/1977	06/13/1983	08/08/1983

Individual evidence

1. ↑ nuklearforum.ch: 60 instead of 40 years for two more US NPPs from October 2, 2003
2. ^ Nuklearforum.ch: USA: Increase in output for St. Lucie-2 from September 27, 2012
3. ↑ CNN: Florida scuba diver says he was sucked into nuclear plant intake pipe of March 8, 2016
4. ↑ N24: Hobby divers sucked in by nuclear power plant from March 7, 2016
5. ↑ UPI: Diver sucked into nuclear power plant of 8 June 1989
6. ↑ https://nrcpublicblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/ml17009a275.pdf
7. ↑ NRC inspection report
8. ↑ Nuclear power plants plague: St. Lucie (USA)
9. ↑ http://www.tcpalm.com/story/weather/hurricanes/2016/10/06/st-lucie-power-plant-hurricane-matthew/91698020/
10. ↑ Power Reactor Information System of the IAEA : "United States of America: Nuclear Power Reactors - Alphabetic" (English)

See also

• List of nuclear power plants