Susquehanna Steam Electric Station
The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Susquehanna is capable of generating enough power to provide more than two million homes with electricity. Susquehanna also supplies energy to an adjacent data center campus. It is located near the Susquehanna River in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
Operations
Susquehanna Station Nuclear, a division of Talen Energy, serves as 90% owner and operator of the 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. PPL operated the plant until June 2015 when Talen Energy was formed from PPL's competitive supply business. The plant has two General Electric boiling water reactors within a Mark II containment building on a site of, with approximately 900 employees working on site and additional support employees in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg-based Allegheny Electric Cooperative purchased 10% of the plant in 1977.The station has been in operation since 1983. The prime builder was Bechtel Power Corporation of Reston, Virginia. In November 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extended the operation licenses of the reactors for an additional 20 years and the station has received additional license extensions since then with Unit 1 licensed through 2042 and Unit 2 through 2044.
Data center
Cumulus Data, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, developed a data center campus directly connected to the Susquehanna plant. On January 17, 2023, it completed the phase 1 construction. On March 4, 2024, it was sold to Amazon Web Services for 650 million dollars. As part of the transaction, the Susquehanna station will provide power to the data center campus.Abandoned plans for an adjacent power plant
In 2008, PPL filed an application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build and operate a new nuclear plant under consideration near Berwick, Pennsylvania. The Bell Bend Nuclear Power Plant would be built near the company’s existing two-unit Susquehanna nuclear power plant. On August 30, 2016, Talen Energy formally requested the license application be withdrawn, and the NRC officially accepted the application withdrawal on September 22, 2016, officially cancelling the project. Unlike the existing two units, which are American-designed boiling water reactors, the plan called for the French-German EPR which is a pressurized water reactor. At 1.6 Gigawatt net electric nameplate capacity, the EPR is the nuclear power plant design with the highest per-reactor electric power output ever built.Incidents
In the plant's first emergency, an electrical fire erupted at a switch box that controls the supply of cooling water to emergency systems. No injuries were reported following the 1982 incident.Roughly 10,000 gallons of mildly radioactive water spilled at the Station's Unit 1 turbine building after a gasket failed in the filtering system in 1985. No radiation was released from the building to the public, and no personnel were contaminated as a result of this incident.
Surrounding population
The NRC defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about, concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity.The 2010 U.S. population within of Susquehanna was 54,686, an increase of 3.3 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within was 1,765,761, an increase of 5.5 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Wilkes-Barre and the larger city, Scranton.