Reprieved New York plant drives local investment

The James A Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant, which had been scheduled to close a year ago, is today driving significant investment in local businesses in New York State, Exelon said yesterday. More than $15 million was invested in 2017 in capital projects to support the plant for long-term operations.

The James A Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant, which had been scheduled to close a year ago, is today driving significant investment in local businesses in New York State, Exelon said yesterday. More than $15 million was invested in 2017 in capital projects to support the plant for long-term operations.

Fitzpatrick (Image: Entergy)

Former plant owner Entergy announced in 2016 it would close the single-unit plant in January last year, despite being licensed to operate until 2034, because of economic conditions. However the state of New York subsequently adopted a Clean Energy Standard (CES) supporting the continued operation of nuclear capacity, after which Exelon agreed to buy and operate the plant in a deal worth $110 million. Exelon also operates two other nuclear plants in upstate New York, RE Ginna and Nine Mile Point, which had also been under threat of premature closure prior to the adoption of the CES.

"In 2017, we promised to invest more than $400 million across our New York plants through refuelling and integration expenditures, and we did," Exelon's senior vice president of Northeast Operations, Chris Mudrick, said. "As part of this investment, we partnered with several New York and minority- and women-owned businesses to benefit the community while making FitzPatrick a first-class facility that could continue providing clean energy to New York for years to come."

Capital projects worth a total of more than $15.2 million have been launched over the past year to realign Fitzpatrick for long-term operations. These have included safety improvements in the car parks and pedestrian areas; various equipment upgrades and general site remodelling.

Work is also under way on a new $2.9 million site access building, providing a more efficient, secure personnel access process, especially during refuelling outages when some 1000 supplemental workers join the plant's full-time employees.

Since the passage of the CES legislation, Exelon invested more than $180 million in outages at Ginna and Nine Mile Point, including new fuel, capital upgrades and outage execution costs, and helped to fund refuelling outage costs of over $130 million at Fitzpatrick.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News