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  • 21 Aug, 2019

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Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plant
Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station is a thermal nuclear power plant located in Lower Alloways Creek Township, in Salem County, New Jersey, United States, on the same site on Artificial Island as the two-unit Salem Nuclear Power Plant. The plant is owned and operated by PSEG Nuclear LLC. It has one unit (one reactor), a boiling water reactor (BWR) manufactured by GE. The complex was designed for two units, but the second unit was cancelled in 1981. It has a generating capacity of 1,268 MWe. The plant came online on July 25, 1986, licensed to operate until 2026. In 2009, PSEG applied for a 20-year license renewal, which it received in 2011 to operate until 2046. With its combined output of 3,572 megawatts, the Salem-Hope Creek complex is the largest nuclear generating facility in the Eastern United States and the second largest nationwide, after the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona.

Hope Creek is one of three licensed nuclear power reactors in New Jersey. The others are the two units at the adjacent Salem plant. As of January 1, 2005, New Jersey ranked 10th among the 31 states with nuclear capacity for total MWe generated. In 2021, nuclear plants generated 45% of the electricity in the state.

In 2019, New Jersey began providing the state's nuclear plants Zero-Emission Certificates worth $300 million a year to keep them in service. The subsidy was ended in 2024, effective June 1, 2025, as the Inflation Reduction Act provides alternative tax credits to support clean energy.

Plant features

Hope Creek is a boiling water reactor (BWR) unlike its neighbors at the nearby Salem Nuclear Plant which are pressurized water reactors (PWR).

Hope Creek's reactor is used to produce electricity. The plant's huge natural-draft cooling tower can be seen from many miles away in both Delaware and New Jersey and as far west as Elk Neck Peninsula in Maryland. The cooling tower can be seen from the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the bridges over the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. This cooling tower serves only Hope Creek's single reactor. The neighboring Salem units utilize once-through cooling with no cooling tower.

A unique feature of Hope Creek is its cylindrical reactor building complete with a dome which makes it appear similar to a pressurized water reactor containment building which is not typical of boiling water reactors. This similarity is limited to appearance. Like other BWRs, the actual containment vessel for the reactor is a separate drywell/torus structure enclosed within the reactor building, but structurally separate. The outer reactor building serves as secondary containment and houses many of the reactor's safety systems.

Surrounding population

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 10 miles (16 km), concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 miles (80 km), concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity.

The 2010 U.S. population within 10 miles (16 km) of Hope Creek was 53,811, an increase of 53.3 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within 50 miles (80 km) was 5,523,010, an increase of 7.5 percent since 2000.

Cities within 50 miles:

Seismic risk

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Hope Creek was 1 in 357,143, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

References

  1. ^ "EIA - State Nuclear Profiles". www.eia.gov. Retrieved 3 October 2017.
  2. ^ The Hope Creek Generating Station Archived 2007-10-25 at the Wayback Machine, PSE&G. Accessed September 15, 2007.
  3. ^ "PSEG seeks licence renewals for two plants". World Nuclear News. 19 August 2009. Retrieved 2009-08-18.
  4. ^ Caroom, Eliot (July 20, 2011). "Hope Creek's license extended by NRC - with conditions". The Star-Ledger. Retrieved 21 July 2011.
  5. ^ "NRC - Licensed Facilities by Region or State - New Jersey". US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Retrieved 2011-03-13.
  6. ^ "Electricity Data Browser, Net generation for all sectors, New Jersey, Fuel Type-Check all, Annual, 2001–21". www.eia.gov. Retrieved 2022-07-18.
  7. ^ Johnson, Tom (February 15, 2024). "BPU pulls plug on unpopular nuclear subsidy". NJ Spotlight News.
  8. ^ "NRC: Backgrounder on Emergency Preparedness for Nuclear Power Plants". Archived from the original on 2006-10-02. Retrieved 2013-05-25.
  9. ^ "Nuclear neighbors: Population rises near US reactors". NBC News. 2011-04-14. Retrieved 2024-08-16.
  10. ^ "What are the odds? US nuke plants ranked by quake risk". NBC News. 2011-03-16. Retrieved 2024-08-16.
  11. ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-05-25. Retrieved 2011-04-19.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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