Get an inside look at the nation's largest nuclear power plant in ... - Arizona's Family
Get an inside look at the nation’s largest nuclear power plant in Tonopah
TONOPAH, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) - Arizona’s Family recently got a look inside the Palo Verde Generating Station, the largest nuclear power plant in the country. The plant is housed on 4,000 acres of land in Tonopah, with three nuclear reactors and millions upon millions of gallons of reclaimed wastewater. And it’s all to harness the power of uranium pellets, which are only the size of a pencil’s eraser.
Palo Verde supplies power for 4 million homes and businesses in portions of states including Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. It’s owned by seven different companies and operated by APS.
“It powers the whole southwest,” said John Hernandez, Palo Verde’s VP of Site Services. “We are the largest producer of power of any kind, and we have been for the last 30 years.”
This type of energy doesn’t come without concern with the fallouts of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Fukushima in Japan and Chernobyl in Ukraine. Arizona’s Family asked Hernandez why someone would want a nuclear plant in their own backyard. “One: The United States industry is very different than other industries,” Hernandez answered. “If you look at Fukushima, we can point to processes there that we have here that we can learn from. It is the safest technology that exists. It’s the cleanest that exists.”
It comes with a lot of painstaking safety precautions for employees. During the tour, Arizona’s Family went through the same procedure their employees do as the crew entered the containment dome where one of their reactors is held. It was a rare experience when the reactor was being refueled, which is only a semi-annual event.
“Y’all had a bit of a unique experience,” Hernandez said. “Most people won’t get into a containment building and see the reactor for themselves. The only way you get to this level of safe is having all of those layers, meticulous programs and processes in place.”
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Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: nuclear
Nuclear energy provides almost 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply. Advocates have called for an expanded role for nuclear as an emissions-free fuel source. But the economics of building new reactors are daunting. In addition, lingering safety concerns are an institutionalized part of the calculation of nuclear regulation, and highly radioactive nuclear waste remains a can that public officials have been inclined to kick down the road. The Energy Information Administration projects a sharp decline in nuclear power generation over the next decade, as new nuclear plants — two are planned — are more than offset by anticipated retirements of several operating reactors.