Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station was a

nuclear power plant A nuclear power plant (NPP), also known as a nuclear power station (NPS), nuclear generating station (NGS) or atomic power station (APS) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power st ...

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 ...

, 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 ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

. Its 180 MWe

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, India and Canada). In a PWR, water is used both as ...

operated from 1961 to 1991. It produced electricity for

New England New England is a region consisting of 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 (state), New York to the west and by the ...

consumers. The site is referred to 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 reac ...

, 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 201 ...

. The decommissioning of the site was completed in 2007.

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

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 ...

, 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. Operatin ...

, a commercial

boiling water reactor A boiling water reactor (BWR) is a type of nuclear reactor used for the generation of electrical power. It is the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor after the pressurized water reactor (PWR). BWR are thermal neutro ...

(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 appr ...

24.5% *

Boston Edison Company The Boston Edison Company (BECo) was incorporated as the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston in 1886.; citing: International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 12. St. James Press, 1996. It was one of the earliest electric utility com ...

9.5% * Central Maine Power Company 9.5% * Public Service Company of New Hampshire 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 appr ...

7.0% *

Central Vermont Public Service Corporation Central Vermont Public Service Corp. (CVPS) was the largest electricity supplier in Vermont. Its customer base covered 160,000 people in 163 towns, villages and cities in Vermont. The company generated revenue mainly though purchased electricity t ...

3.5% *

Commonwealth Electric Company NSTAR was a 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 April 2012. In Febru ...

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 {{no footnotes, date=December 2016 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 ...

was $45 million against an estimated cost of $57 million, according to the engineering consultant

Kenneth Nichols Kenneth David Nichols CBE (13 November 1907 – 21 February 2000) was an officer in the United States Army, and a civil engineer who worked on the secret Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II. He served as Deput ...

, who had been deputy to

Leslie Groves 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 Classified information#Top_Secret_(TS), top sec ...

on the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the ...

. 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 (27 January 1900 – 8 July 1986) was an admiral in the United States Navy. He directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of the U.S. Naval Reacto ...

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 def ...

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 refers to the ability of a material to sustain significant plastic Deformation (engineering), deformation before fracture. Plastic deformation is the permanent distortion of a material under applied stress, as opposed to elastic def ...

). In August 2007, the

Nuclear Regulatory Commission The United States 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 ...

declared the decommissioning of Yankee Rowe completed.''History of Yankee Rowe''
The Yankee Companies (accessed Feb 2023) In its 2004 ''License Termination Plan'', Yankee Atomic Electric Company wrote that between 1992 and 2003 already $348 million was spent on decommissioning and the estimated costs for further decommissioning, contingency and spent fuel storage were about $390 million.''License Termination Plan''
p. 7-5. Yankee, 19 Nov 2004 (16MB)
Via
/ref> In total, the cost for decommissioning of the plant was $608 million, up from an initial estimate of $368 million.Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2014, Vol. 70(4) 26–36 DOI: 10.1177/0096340214539111. Author David Lochbaum.
/ref>

Nuclear waste disposal

While most of the grounds were released as safe, a cask storage facility remained under NRC supervision. Spent nuclear fuel and "Greater Than Class C" (GTCC) waste were stored in the newly built on-site ''dry cask'' "Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation" (ISFSI) by June 2003. This would be turned over to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 2022. The spent fuel storage facility takes up about 80 acres and will be operated by "Yankee Atomic". The waste is stored in 15 canisters of spent fuel and one container with GTCC. The GTCC includes the reactor's control rods and other removed radioactive elements. It is considered safe after 500 years. The spent fuel is expected to be safe within 100 years.
Bob Audette, Bennington Banner, 18 Aug 2007 The nuclear waste is contained in dry casks made of 21 inches of reinforced concrete, surrounding a -inch-thick steel liner, with each cask weighing 100 tons. The 16 casks sit on a 3-foot-thick concrete pad. It will remain at the site until DOE has completed 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.

References

External links