The Bugey Nuclear Power Plant is located in Bugey in the

Saint-Vulbas Saint-Vulbas () is a commune in the Ain department in eastern France. Population Geography The town is located on the right bank of the Rhône , 205 meters above sea level, 35 kilometers northeast of Lyon , 13 kilometers from Ambérieu-e ...

commune ( Ain), about 75 km from the Swiss border. The site occupies 100

hectare The hectare (; SI symbol: ha) is a non-SI metric unit of area equal to a square with 100- metre sides (1 hm2), or 10,000 m2, and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. An acre is ...

s. It is on the edge of the

Rhône River The Rhône ( , ; wae, Rotten ; frp, Rôno ; oc, Ròse ) is a major river in France and Switzerland, rising in the Alps and flowing west and south through Lake Geneva and southeastern France before discharging into the Mediterranean Sea. At Ar ...

, from where it gets its cooling water, and is about 35 km upstream from

Lyon Lyon,, ; Occitan: ''Lion'', hist. ''Lionés'' also spelled in English as Lyons, is the third-largest city and second-largest metropolitan area of France. It is located at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône, to the northwest of ...

and 72 km from

Grenoble lat, Gratianopolis , commune status = Prefecture and commune , image = Panorama grenoble.png , image size = , caption = From upper left: Panorama of the city, Grenoble’s cable cars, place Saint- ...

. About 1,200 people work at the site. The site houses 4 currently operating units, all being

pressurized water reactor A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of 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 coolant (water) is ...

s. The 5th reactor (unit 1) is currently being dismantled. It was the last UNGG reactor built in the world. Some of the cooling comes from direct use of the Rhône water (units 2 and 3) while some is done by the use of

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 and ...

s (units 4 and 5).

Seismic activity

The area is not known for its seismic activity. In the last few years, the plant was modernized to updated

earthquake An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, from ...

resistance standards.

Heat dumping

During the heat wave on 20 July 2003,

waste heat Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work. All such processes give off some waste heat as a fundamental result of the laws of thermodynamics. Waste heat has lower utilit ...

water was piped into the Rhône, which is permitted, in extreme cases, for about 2 hours and the maximum heat difference was 0.9 degrees Celsius. Again on 30 July 2003, water was directly discharged into the Rhône for 9 hours.

Reactor units

Bugey 5 was offline from August 2015 to July 2017 due to an air leak in the inner liner of its containment.

References

External links

INSC database: Bugey
{{Authority control Nuclear power stations in France Buildings and structures in Ain