Vogtle Electric Generating Plant
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| NRC Region Two (South) |
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| Alabama |
| Bellefonte* Browns Ferry Farley |
| Florida |
| Crystal River 3 St. Lucie Turkey Point |
| Georgia |
| Hatch Vogtle |
| North Carolina |
| Brunswick McGuire Shearon Harris |
| South Carolina |
| Catawba Oconee H.B. Robinson Summer |
| Tennessee |
| Sequoyah Watts Bar |
| Virginia |
| North Anna Surry |
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* unfinished |
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The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant is a 2-unit nuclear power plant located in Burke County, near Augusta and Waynesboro, Georgia. The plant is jointly owned by Georgia Power (45.7%), Oglethorpe Power Corporation (30%), Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (22.7%) and the City of Dalton (1.6%). Each unit has a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, with a General Electric turbine and electric generator. Units 1 and 2 were completed in 1987 and 1989, respectively. Each of Vogtle's units is capable of producing approximately 1200MW of electricity when online, for a combined capacity of 2400MW. Southern Nuclear lists the capacity as 1215MW each, for a combined output of 2430MW.[1] The twin cooling towers are 548 ft (167 m) tall.
During Vogtle's construction, costs skyrocketed from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.[2] [3] This was typical of the time due to increased regulations after the Three Mile Island accident.
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[edit] Site area emergency
On March 20, 1990 at 9:20 a.m. a truck carrying fuel and lubricants in the plant's low voltage switchyard backed into a support column for the feeder line supplying power to the Unit 1-A reserve auxiliary transformer (RAT). This set off a complicated chain of events that was exacerbated both by planned maintenance (in which some back-up systems were off-line) and by equipment failures in some back-up systems. The resulting loss of electrical power in the plant's "vital circuits" shut down the residual heat removal (RHR) pump that was cooling Unit 1 (which was nearing the end of a refueling outage) and prevented the back-up RHR from activating. Even though Unit 1 was not operating at full-power, residual heat from the natural decay of the radioactive fuel needed to be removed to prevent a dangerous rise in core temperature. At 9:40 a.m. the plant operators declared a site area emergency (SAE) per existing procedures which called for an SAE whenever "vital" power is lost for more than 15 minutes. At 9:56 a.m., plant operators performed a manual start of the A-train emergency diesel generator (EDG), which bypassed most of the EDG's protective trips that had prevented it from coming on-line. RHR-A was then started using power from EDG-A. With core cooling restored the SAE was downgraded to an alert at 10:15 a.m. The temperature of the Unit 1 core coolant increased from 90F to 136F during the 36 minutes required to re-energize the A-side bus. Ironically, throughout the event, non-vital power was continuously available to Unit 1 from off-site sources. However, the Vogtle electrical system was not designed to permit easy interconnection of the Unit 1 vital buses to non-vital power or to the Unit 2 electrical buses.(ref NRC Information Notice No. 90-25) Since this incident, Plant Vogtle has implemented changes to the plant that allow power to be transferred from one side to the other from an off-site source.
[edit] Units 3 and 4
On August 15, 2006, Southern Nuclear formally applied for an Early Site Permit (ESP) for two additional units. The ESP will determine whether the site is appropriate for additional reactors, and this process is separate from the Combined Construction and Operating License(COL) Application process.[4] On March 31, 2008, Southern Nuclear announced that it had submitted an application for a COL, a process which will take at least 3 to 4 years.[5] On April 9, 2008, Georgia Power Company reached a contract agreement for two AP1000 reactors designed by Westinghouse (owned by Toshiba) and the Shaw Group (Baton Rouge, LA).[6] The contract represents the first agreement for new nuclear development since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and still needs approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC).[7] As stated by a Georgia Power spokesperson Carol Boatright: "If the PSC approves, we are going forward with the new units."[6]
[edit] References
- ^ Plant Vogtle - Southern Company. Southern Company. Retrieved on 2-Mar-2007.
- ^ Gertner, Jon. "Atomic Balm?", New York Times, July 16, 2006.
- ^ Moens, John (Fri Mar 18 09:15:09 EDT 2005). U.S. Nuclear Plants - Vogtle. Energy Information Administration - U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved on 2-Mar-2007.
- ^ NRC: Early Site Permits - Licensing Reviews. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Retrieved on 31-May-2007.
- ^ Southern utilities apply for new nuclear licenses. Reuters. Retrieved on 02-Apr-2008.
- ^ a b Westinghouse wins first US nuclear deal in 30 years. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved on 9-Apr-2008.
- ^ Georgia Power to Expand Nuclear Plant. Associated Press. Retrieved on 9-Apr-2008.
[edit] External links
- Plant Vogtle Southern Nuclear Homepage
- DoE Page
- NRC Page for Vogtle 1
- NRC Page for Vogtle 2
- NRC; Vogtle Nuclear Site, Units 3 & 4 Application
- Vogtle Electric Generating Plant is at coordinates Coordinates:
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