Power Magazine in Tuesday named its top power plants for nuclear generation, naming the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the Ningde Nuclear Power Plant in Fujian Province, China and the recently commissioned Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4 in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia, as the best of the year 2016.
The Peach Bottom station includes 1974-commissioned reactors that could generate electricity "well into the 2050s," the magazine said, "thanks to a successful extended power uprate, conducted while the plant operated at over 92 percent annual capacity factor through the six-year project.
Among the plant's "winning attributes", the magazine says is the completion of the uprate project, which increased thermal output from each reactor by 12.4 percent with the addition of 270 MW of electrical generation.
The stretch uprate for Units 2 and 3 at Peach Bottom were implemented in the 1990s, boosting power by 5 percent, which kicked up thermal capacity of each unit from 3,293 MWt to 3,458 MWt. In 2002, Exelon Generation took the next step by installing Caldon Leading Edge Flow Meter CheckPlus to measure feedwater flow on each unit, which "reduced calorimetric core thermal power measurement uncertainty to less than plus and minus 0.38 percent," Power says. Because of this, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a measurement uncertainty recapture power uprate of 1.62 percent, which bumped capacity further, raising it to 3,514 MWt.
The Ningde plant in China is part of the country's continuing efforts to reduce air pollution, which is relying on nuclear power to help reduce carbon emissions. The plant includes four reactors that rely on China's mostly indigenous CPR-1000 design.
Unit 4 at Beloyarsk, the second generation of reactors at the facility, is a sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor, which is a reactor type that has, Power Magazine says, "a checkered history." Yet, Russia remains committed to refining and developing them, culminating currently in the BN-800 reactor, the largest such design in the world.