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Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station ( decommissioned) was a
nuclear power plant A nuclear power plant (NPP) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power stations, heat is used to generate steam that drives a steam turbine connected to a electric generator, generato ...
in
Rowe, Massachusetts Rowe is a town in Franklin County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 424 at the 2020 census. History Rowe was the site of fishing and foraging for local Native American tribes. The area was first visited by white settlers in 1 ...
, that operated from 1960 to 1992. The 185-megawatt electric pressurized-water plant, located on the Deerfield River in the town of
Rowe Rowe may refer to: Places *Rowe, Massachusetts, U.S. *Rowe, New Mexico, U.S. *Rowes Bay, Queensland, a suburb of Townsville Australia *Rowe, now Rówek, Poland Other *Rowe (surname) *Rowe (musician), solo project of Becky Louise Filip, former mem ...
in western
Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...
, right on the border of Readsboro, Vermont, permanently shut down on February 26, 1992, after more than 31 years of producing electricity for
New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...
electric consumers. Most of the men and women who worked either in the plant or during the decommissioning efforts referred to the site as "Yankee-Rowe" or simply "Rowe", to avoid confusion with
Vermont Yankee Vermont Yankee was an electricity generating nuclear power plant, located in the town of Vernon, Vermont, in the northeastern United States. It generated 620 megawatts (MWe) of electricity at full power. The plant was a boiling water reacto ...
, another nuclear power station located in nearby
Vernon, Vermont Vernon is a town in Windham County, Vermont, in the United States. The population was 2,192 at the 2020 census. Vernon is the site of the now-defunct Vermont Yankee, the state of Vermont's only nuclear power plant, which closed in December 2014. ...
.


Firsts

The first power plant in this area was W.T. Turner's Hydro-electric production service to the town of Charlemont. Yankee atomic is the distant second as far as local heritage and historical significance. Yankee Nuclear Power Station (YNPS) was the third commercial nuclear power plant built in the United States and the first built in New England. According to several sources Yankee Rowe was the first commercial
pressurized water reactor A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of light-water reactor, light-water nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan and Canada). In a PWR, the primary ...
operating in the United States. This view discounts the government-sponsored
Shippingport Atomic Power Station The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was (according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission) the world's first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses.Though Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant was connected to the M ...
, which was not built on a commercial basis and relied on several technologies that would not be embraced by the commercial operators. The
Dresden Generating Station Dresden Generating Station (also known as Dresden Nuclear Power Plant or Dresden Nuclear Power Station) is the first privately financed nuclear power plant built in the United States. Dresden 1 was activated in 1960 and retired in 1978. Operati ...
, a commercial
boiling water reactor A boiling water reactor (BWR) is a type of light water nuclear reactor used for the generation of electrical power. It is a design different from a Soviet graphite-moderated RBMK. It is the second most common type of electricity-generating nuc ...
(BWR), slightly preceded the opening of Yankee Rowe in 1960. US government sources place the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at Dresden-1 on 15 October 1959 and the first one at Yankee Rowe on 19 August 1960. Yankee Rowe began commercial operation in 1961. It has also been named as the first large-scale nuclear unit in the United States.Oldest operating US nuclear power plant shut down
/ref>


Construction

''Yankee Atomic Electric Company'' (YAEC) was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1954. YAEC was sponsored by ten New England utilities for the purpose of constructing and operating New England's first nuclear power plant, the Yankee Nuclear Power Station. Owners and ownership percentage: *
New England Power Company National Grid plc is a British multinational electricity and gas utility company headquartered in London, England. Its principal activities are in the United Kingdom, where it owns and operates electricity and natural gas transmission networks ...
34.5% *
Connecticut Light and Power Company Eversource Energy is a publicly traded, Fortune 500 energy company headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts, with several regulated subsidiaries offering retail electricity, natural gas service and water service to appro ...
24.5% *
Boston Edison Company The Boston Edison Company (BECo) was incorporated as the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston in 1886. It was one of the earliest electric utility companies in the United States of America. The company was formally renamed the Boston Edis ...
9.5% *
Central Maine Power Company Avangrid, Inc. (formerly Energy East and Iberdrola USA), is an energy services and delivery company. AVANGRID serves about 3.1 million customers throughout New England, Pennsylvania and New York in the United States. History In 2008 Iberdrola S. ...
9.5% *
Public Service Company of New Hampshire Public Service of New Hampshire, commonly known as PSNH, was the largest public utility in the U.S. state of New Hampshire for decades. Founded in 1926, it sold natural gas and electricity, and for a time ran electric street-railway services and ...
7.0% *
Western Massachusetts Electric Company Eversource Energy is a publicly traded, Fortune 500 energy company headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts, with several regulated subsidiaries offering retail electricity, natural gas service and water service to appro ...
7.0% * Central Vermont Public Service Corporation 3.5% *
Commonwealth Electric Company NSTAR was a public utility, utility company that provided retail electricity and natural gas to 1.4 million customers in eastern and central Massachusetts, including the Boston urban area. NSTAR became a subsidiary of Northeast Utilities in Apri ...
2.5% * Cambridge Electric Light Company 2.0% Construction of the plant was completed in 1960 at a cost of $39 million. The
capital cost Capital costs are fixed, one-time expenses incurred on the purchase of land, buildings, construction, and equipment used in the production of goods or in the rendering of services. In other words, it is the total cost needed to bring a project to a ...
was $45 million against an estimated cost of $57 million, according to the engineering consultant
Kenneth Nichols Major General Kenneth David Nichols CBE (13 November 1907 – 21 February 2000), also known by Nick, was an officer in the United States Army, and a civil engineer who worked on the secret Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb dur ...
, who had been deputy to
Leslie Groves Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr. (17 August 1896 – 13 July 1970) was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project, a top secret research project ...
on the
Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...
. He wrote that the Connecticut Yankee and Yankee Rowe nuclear power plants were considered "experimental" and were not expected to be competitive with coal and oil, they "became competitive because of inflation ... and the large increase in price of coal and oil." When the Yankee Rowe plant was announced Admiral
Hyman Rickover Hyman G. Rickover (January 27, 1900 – July 8, 1986) was an admiral in the U.S. Navy. He directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of the U.S. Naval Reactors offic ...
called him and said the "low cost figure" of $57 million was "impossible to achieve … and I hate to see you ruin your reputation." But Nichols replied that many items were on fixed prices and many of the conventional components would be to normal utility standards to save money without sacrificing safety or reliability. During its 32-year operating history, the Yankee plant generated over 34 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and had a lifetime
capacity factor The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of actual electrical energy output over a given period of time to the theoretical maximum electrical energy output over that period. The theoretical maximum energy output of a given installation is de ...
of 74%.


Decommissioning

Yankee Rowe was shut down prematurely due to reactor pressure vessel embrittlement concerns. This safety factor is now scrutinized in all plants (see
ductility Ductility is a mechanical property commonly described as a material's amenability to drawing (e.g. into wire). In materials science, ductility is defined by the degree to which a material can sustain plastic deformation under tensile stres ...
). In 2007, the
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 operat ...
declared the decommissioning of Yankee Rowe complete. In total, the cost for decommissioning the plant was $508 million, up from an initial estimate of $368 million.
Nicola Armaroli Nicola Armaroli ( Bentivoglio, 2 September 1966) is an Italian chemist, research director at the Italian National Research Council (CNR), director of the scientific magazinSapereand member of the Italian National Academy of Sciences. Life and ...
,
Vincenzo Balzani Vincenzo Balzani (born 15 November 1936 in Forlimpopoli, Italy) is an Italian chemist, now emeritus professor at the University of Bologna. Career He has spent most of his professional life at the “Giacomo Ciamician” Department of Chemistr ...
: ''Energy for a Sustainable World – From the Oil Age to a Sun-Powered Future''. Wiley-VCH 2011, p. 142-144.
While most of the grounds were released as safe, a cask storage facility remained under NRC supervision. 533 spent fuel assemblies weighing approximately each are still on-site. They are contained in dry casks made of 21 inches of reinforced concrete, surrounding a -inch-thick steel liner, with each cask weighing 100 tons. The sixteen casks sit on a 3-foot-thick concrete pad. These will be located at the site until the U.S. Department of Energy completes a permanent storage facility for spent nuclear reactor fuel and the spent fuel stored at Rowe can be transferred to such a future federal facility. The time frame for removal of spent fuel from the Yankee Rowe site is unknown.


See also

* Lelan Sillin, Jr.* New England Coalition *
Nuclear power in the United States Nuclear power in the United States is provided by 92 commercial reactors with a net capacity of 94.7 gigawatts (GW), with 61 pressurized water reactors and 31 boiling water reactors. In 2019, they produced a total of 809.41 terawatt-hours of el ...


References


External links


Yankee Rowe


{{Coord, 42, 43, 40.22, N, 72, 55, 44.79, W, region:US_type:landmark, display=title Energy infrastructure completed in 1960 Nuclear power plants in Massachusetts Decommissioned nuclear power stations in the United States Buildings and structures in Franklin County, Massachusetts Nuclear power stations using pressurized water reactors