Susquehanna Steam Electric Station has 2 units. Both of these units represent the nation’s largest Boiler Water Reactors (BWRs).

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the Amendments #246 and #224 in January 2008, to allow these units Extended Power Uprates (EPU).

These amendments allowed the increase from 3489 MWt (Megawatt thermal) to 3952 MWt, a thermal increase of about 13%.

One of the conditions was that Susquehanna would continue to inspect the steam dryer during the next 2 outages after the full EPU had been completed.

Susquehanna submitted the results in July, 2015, and the NRC on October 9th, 2015 wrote back that the NRC had reviewed the results and found the acceptable (see NRC CAC MF6505).



What exactly does it mean to increase the thermal generation of each unit by 463 MW?

As an average, if we equate 3 MWt to approx. 1 MWe for an EPU, we begin to understand that 463 MWt will equal approximately 154 MWe, per unit.So what does an a average MWe cost? Yearly average is approx. $45/MWe hour.

And since there are 8760 hours in a year, (45 X 8760) this equal $394,200/MWHe.

For Susquehanna’s EPU, this equal (394000 X 154) $60,706,800 per unit or $121, 413,600.

Yes, that does seem like a lot of money. But EPUs are NOT cheap.

NEXTERA recently completed EPUs at 3 of their plants, which totaled almost $3 billion dollars. Yet, the EPUs produced almost 700 MWe from those EPUs.

So the payback time varies, but most EPUs have a 5 to 7 year payback, with the ability to run those plants an additional 20+ years.