Dampierre Nuclear Power Plant
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Active reactors ( gross ):
The Dampierre nuclear power plant is located in the French community Dampierre- en-Burly in the Centre region in the Loiret. The nuclear power plant, which consists of four pressurized water reactors, is located about 55 kilometers east of the city of Orléans on the banks of the Loire.
Key data
The 120 -acre nuclear power plant complex employs approximately 1,250 people. Operator of the nuclear power plant is the French company Electricité de France (EDF). The cooling of the reactor units is carried out with four cooling towers and the Loire water withdrawn.
The four pressurized water reactors have a net power output of 890 megawatts ( MW) and a gross capacity of 937 MW. The total installed capacity is 3748 MW, making it one nuclear power plant to the larger in France. Every year, it feeds an average of 23 billion kilowatt hours into the public power grid. This corresponds to approximately seven times the annual electricity consumption of the Loiret region and five percent of the electrical energy produced annually by the operator EDF.
The construction of the first reactor block was started on February 1, 1975; in the same year was the start of construction for the other three reactors. The first block was put into operation on 23 March 1980 the last reactor block was put into operation on 30 January 1981. The shutdown of the reactors is planned for the years 2020 and 2021.
Security
In the case of a strong earthquake could lead to failure of the emergency cooling. A report by the nuclear safety authority ASN in October 2002 show, certain protection features to ensure the cooling of the reactor blocks are no longer guaranteed during earthquakes. This is a safety-relevant valve whose functioning is compromised in an earthquake.
In block 3 of the nuclear power plant located on 9 April 2007 an incident that was similar to that in the Forsmark nuclear power plant occurred. A defect in any overvoltage protection relay led to the separation of the power plant from the main power grid. To dissipate the resulting inevitable, risk-related decay heat with pump after the shutdown of the reactor should have been made a switchover to the standby power supply, but this was omitted. This also brought an emergency case (total external power failure). In one of the two properly powered-up emergency diesel generators with 100 % capacity, the switching to the assigned power rail failed, so that the power supply could be guaranteed only by a single current-driven emergency power train. There were potentially two more redundancies for the emergency case available: a self- steam-powered pump, which would have been ready for use more or less immediately, as well as a power-generating gas turbine, which would, however, not been readily available, according to the Institut de Radio Protection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, but a certain start-up time required. Due to the serious situation of the site emergency plan has been activated. It took ten hours to the external power supply was made by the network again.