Susquehanna Steam Electric Station

Nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania

The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is a nuclear power station on the Susquehanna River in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

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 1,130 employees working on site and another 180 employees in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg based Allegheny Electric Cooperative purchased 10% of the plant in 1977. Susquehanna produces 63 gigawatt hours per day. It has been in operation since 1983. The prime builder was Bechtel Power Corporation of Reston, Virginia. In November 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) extended the operation licenses of the reactors for an additional 20 years.

Cumulus Data, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, is developing a data center directly connected to the power stations. 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.

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 On August 30, 2016, Talen Energy formally requested the license application be withdrawn, and the NRC officially accepted the application withdrawal on September 22, 2016, officially cancelling the project.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 (1.66 GW in the case of Taishan nuclear power plant), the EPR is the nuclear power plant design with the highest per reactor electric power output ever built.

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. Installed drains collect water, and is released into the air. No radiation was released from the building to the public, and no personnel were contaminated as a result of this incident.

The NRC defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 10 mile (16 km), concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 mile (80 km), concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U. S. population within 10 mile (16 km) 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 50 mile (80 km) was 1,765,761, an increase of 5.5 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Wilkes Barre (18 miles to city center) and the larger city, Scranton (33 miles to center city).

The NRC's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Susquehanna was 1 in 76,923, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.