Grand Gulf Nuclear Station is a nuclear power station with one operational GE BWR reactor (

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable ene ...

boiling water reactor). It lies on a site near Port Gibson, Mississippi. The site is wooded and contains two lakes. The plant has a 520-foot natural draft

cooling tower A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat an ...

. As of January 2023, the plant employs 675 people. Grand Gulf's reactor is the most powerful in the US and the 7th most powerful in the world, with a core power of 4408 MW_th yielding a nominal gross electrical output of 1443 MW_e. Grand Gulf is operated by Entergy, which also owns 90% of the station through their subsidiary, System Energy Resources Inc. The other 10% is owned by Cooperative Energy.

Units 2 and 3

Adjacent to the operating Grand Gulf station, is an unfinished concrete structure that was to be the containment for Unit 2, a twin to the existing Unit 1. In December 1979, staggered by construction cost, Entergy (then called Middle South Utilities) stopped work on Unit 2. On September 22, 2005, it was announced that Grand Gulf had been selected as the site for a GE

ESBWR The Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) is a passively safe generation III+ reactor design derived from its predecessor, the Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (SBWR) and from the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). All are desi ...

reactor. For details, see Nuclear Power 2010 Program. This was to be Unit 3. In 2007, the U.S.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with protecting public health and safety related to nuclear energy. Established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, the NRC began opera ...

(NRC) issued an

Early Site Permit Early may refer to: History * The beginning or oldest part of a defined historical period, as opposed to middle or late periods, e.g.: ** Early Christianity ** Early modern Europe Places in the United States * Early, Iowa * Early, Texas * Early ...

(ESP) to Grand Gulf. In 2008, Entergy and NuStart submitted a Combined Construction and Operating License (COL) application for a potential new nuclear unit at the Grand Gulf. On January 9, 2009, Entergy indefinitely postponed work towards the license and construction of Unit 3. In September 2015 the NRC withdrew the COL for the ESBWR unit, at the request of Entergy.

Electricity Production

Surrounding population

The

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 Grand Gulf was 6,572, a decrease of 18.6 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within was 321,400, a decrease of 0.4 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Port Gibson (5 miles to city center), Vicksburg (25 miles). Alcorn State University is 25 miles southwest of the plant.

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 Grand Gulf was 1 in 83,333, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

Release of low levels of tritium into Mississippi River

After heavy rains in late April 2011, workers were pumping standing water collected in the abandoned, never-completed Unit 2 turbine building into the Mississippi River. Detectors sounded alarms at the presence of tritium in the water, and the pumping was stopped. The accidental release was reported to the Mississippi Health Department and the NRC. As of the dates of the news reports, it was unknown both how much tritium had entered the river and how the tritium had collected in the standing water, given that Unit 2 was not an operational reactor and had never been completed. It is unknown how much tritium entered the river because samples were not taken at the leak time. The NRC is investigating to find the source of the leak. Tritium is a very low level beta emitter with an approximate half-life of 12.3 years and it cannot penetrate the outer dead layer of skin. The main concern with this isotope is inhalation or ingestion.

Notes

External links

* * * {{U.S. Nuclear Plants Energy infrastructure completed in 1985 Nuclear power plants in Mississippi Buildings and structures in Claiborne County, Mississippi Nuclear power stations using Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactors Entergy 1985 establishments in Mississippi