Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station is a nuclear power plant with two nuclear reactors located in the town of Scriba, approximately five miles northeast of Oswego, New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario. The site is also occupied by the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant. In April 2011, Exelon of Chicago announced its intention to purchase Constellation Energy, the owner and operator of Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station. The acquisition was approved by FERC and the companies officially combined on March 12, 2012 with Constellation Energy taking the Exelon name. Exelon shares ownership of Unit 1 with Électricité de France and Unit 2 with Électricité de France, and Long Island Power Authority. Exelon is the sole operator of both Units 1 & 2. Both units are boiling water reactors.
Units 1 and 2
Both units are General Electricboiling water reactors. Unit 1, a BWR-2, went online in 1969 and has a rated capacity of. It is the oldest operating commercial nuclear reactor still in service in the United States. Unit 2, a BWR-5, has been in operation since 1988 and has a rated capacity of 1,375 MW. Construction of both units, along with neighboring Fitzpatrick, was commissioned by Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation. Fitzpatrick was sold immediately upon completion, while Niagara Mohawk retained its share of the Nine Mile Point units until 2001, when it sold them to Constellation. On October 31, 2006, Constellation announced that the NRC had granted 20-year license extensions to both units. Unit 1 is now licensed to operate until 2029 and Unit 2 is licensed until 2046. The Nine Mile Point 2 cooling tower is 543 feet tall and is visible from Chimney Bluffs in Sodus, New York nearly 30 miles away. Nine Mile Point 1 draws cooling water from Lake Ontario, and does not have a cooling tower. In early May 2011, the plant operator reported that the plant fuel supplier, General Electric, notified the operator that mathematical errors could've resulted in the reactor's fuel getting hotter than expected. In 2016, Governor of New YorkAndrew Cuomo directed the Public Service Commission to consider ratepayer-financed subsidies similar to those for renewable sources to keep nuclear power stations profitable in the competition against natural gas. Indian Point would not be included in the scheme.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission 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 Nine Mile Point was 35,632, an increase of 17.0 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within was 909,523, an increase of 3.2 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Syracuse.
1991 site area emergency
On August 13, 1991 a "site area emergency" was declared at the plant. According to Time magazine, this was the third occasion an SAE had been declared at a US nuclear plant. The emergency was due to an electrical fault which caused a momentary loss of electrical power to the reactor and control room. The operators shut down the reactor in accordance with the emergency plan requirements. There were no injuries or release of radiation as a result of the incident. The reactor left emergency procedures about 13 hours after initiation. From :
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 Nine Mile Point was Reactor 1: 1 in 238,095; Reactor 2: 1 in 178,571, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.
