Susquehanna Steam Electric Station

• 1. Introduction

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  The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station is a 2.5-gigawatt nuclear power plant on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Every day the station produces about 63 gigawatt hours of electricity, priced at 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Some of that daily output flows directly to an adjacent data center campus. How did a nuclear station built to power Pennsylvania homes end up feeding a data center instead? And what became of the second nuclear plant once planned to stand alongside it?

• 2. Two Reactors, One Site

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  Susquehanna Station Nuclear, a division of Talen Energy, owns 90 percent of the plant and operates it day to day. PPL ran the station until June 2015, when Talen Energy split off from PPL's competitive supply business. Allegheny Electric Cooperative, based in Harrisburg, bought the remaining 10 percent stake back in 1977. Bechtel Power Corporation of Reston, Virginia served as the prime builder, and the station began operating in 1983. Two General Electric boiling water reactors sit inside a Mark II containment building on the plant's 1075 acre site. Roughly 900 employees work on site, with additional support staff based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Annual electricity output at Susquehanna has ranged from about 16.9 million megawatt hours in 2012 to nearly 20.9 million in 2019. Those figures come from the plant's own generation records. In November 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission extended the operating licenses of both reactors by 20 years. Additional extensions have followed since, and Unit 1 is now licensed to run through 2042 while Unit 2 continues through 2044. Those decades of extended runway would later matter for a very different kind of customer nearby. That customer went by the name Cumulus Data.

• 3. Feeding a Data Center

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  Cumulus Data, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, built a data center campus wired directly into the Susquehanna plant at a capacity of 300 megawatts. The campus finished its first phase of construction on the 17th of January 2023. On the 4th of March 2024, Amazon Web Services bought the completed campus for 650 million dollars. Under that deal, Susquehanna will supply the data center with 840 to 1,200 megawatts by 2029. That supply will grow to 1,680 to 1,920 megawatts by 2032, continuing at that level through 2042. The exact size of that future increase depends on how far Amazon expands the data center campus. Talen Energy has said the arrangement carries an expected value of 18 billion dollars. Talen's current two-reactor site was once expected to grow by a third unit nearby, at a location called Bell Bend.

• 4. The Reactor Never Built

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  In 2008, PPL applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build a new nuclear plant near Berwick, Pennsylvania. The proposed Bell Bend Nuclear Power Plant would have stood next to the existing two-unit Susquehanna station. Talen Energy formally asked to withdraw that license application on the 30th of August 2016. The NRC accepted the withdrawal on the 22nd of September 2016, ending the project for good. Bell Bend would have used a French-German reactor design called the EPR, a pressurized water reactor, unlike Susquehanna's existing boiling water reactors. At 1.6 gigawatts of net electric capacity, the EPR is the nuclear reactor design with the highest per-reactor power output ever built. That record reached 1.66 gigawatts at the Taishan plant. Susquehanna's original two reactors had already lived through their own first emergency long before Bell Bend was ever proposed.

• 5. Two Incidents

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  An electrical fire broke out in 1982 at a switch box that controlled cooling water to the plant's emergency systems, marking Susquehanna's first declared emergency. No injuries were reported. In 1985, a gasket failure in the filtering system spilled roughly 10,000 gallons of mildly radioactive water inside the Unit 1 turbine building. No radiation escaped the building, and no personnel were contaminated as a result. Both incidents stayed fully contained inside the plant's own walls. The bigger question for neighbors near Susquehanna today has less to do with fire or spills than with proximity itself.

• 6. Living Near Susquehanna

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  The NRC defines two emergency planning zones around every nuclear plant. The first is a 10 mile plume exposure zone, covering airborne contamination. The second is a roughly 50 mile ingestion zone, covering contaminated food and water. In 2010-54,686 people lived within 10 miles of Susquehanna, according to an analysis of Census data done for msnbc.com. That number marked a 3.3 percent increase over the previous decade. Within 50 miles, the population reached 1,765,761 in 2010, up 5.5 percent since 2000. Wilkes-Barre sits 18 miles from the plant, and Scranton, the larger of the two cities, sits 33 miles away. An NRC study published in August 2010 put the annual risk of an earthquake severe enough to damage Susquehanna's reactor core at 1 in 76,923. The NRC has not published a newer seismic estimate since that study. That leaves 1 in 76,923 as the only annual risk figure on record for Susquehanna's reactor core.