Fort St. Vrain Generating Station
Fort Saint Vrain Generating Station is a natural gas powered electricity generating facility located near the town of Platteville in northern Colorado in the United States. It currently has a capacity of just under 1000MW and is owned and operated by Xcel Energy, the successor to the plant's founder, the Public Service Company of Colorado. It went online in this form in 1996.
The facility was built originally as a nuclear power plant. It operated as a nuclear generating power plant from 1979 until 1989.
Fort Saint Vrain Generating Station was built as Colorado's first and only nuclear power plant and operated as such from 1979 until 1989. It was one of two high temperature gas cooled (HTGR) power reactors in the United States. The primary coolant was helium which transferred heat to a water based secondary coolant system to drive steam generators. The reactor fuel was a combination of fissile uranium and fertile thorium microspheres dispersed within a prismatic graphite matrix. The reactor had an electrical power output of 330MW (330 MWe), generated from a thermal power 842 MW (842 MWth).
The Fort St. Vrain gas-cooled nuclear power plant was proposed in March 1965 and the application was filed with the Atomic Energy Commission in October 1966. Construction began in September 1968. The HTGR design was considered safer than typical boiling water designs of the time, so the typical steel-reinforced, pre-stressed concrete containment dome structure was omitted in favor of a steel-frame containment structure while the reactor core was partially contained within a prestressed concrete reactor pressure vessel (PCRV). The construction cost reached $200 million, or approximately $0.60/installed watt. Initial testing began in 1972 and the first commercial power was distributed in July 1979.
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