Ontario's power glut means possible nuclear plant shutdowns

[PamW]

35. Continuing...

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the future reactor venders of Westinghouse, General Electric, Babcock & Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering started their own nuclear reactor design and development programs. The firms of Westinghouse, Babcock & Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering were already making fossil-fueled boilers for power plants, and had design and development facilities for those. They founded their reactor design and development efforts at the same facilities as their boiler facilities.

General Electric was different. The main General Electric design and research labs are in Schenectady, New York. However, GE didn't found their new reactor design and development facilities at their main labs. They took another route, and founded an entirely new site in California specifically for nuclear reactor design and development; the Vallecitos Lab.

I drive by the Vallecitos Lab any time I go to San Jose for a concert or whatever. You can see it on Google Earth. Find Pleasanton, California, and just south of Pleasanton, find where Interstate I-680 is joined by Vallecitos Road to the east. Go east on Vallecitos Road until you find a collection of buildings on the north side of the road. You can't miss it - it's the only thing out there.

You will see the containment domes of the 3 nuclear reactors on the site. Two of them, including the above prototype for the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) are located right next to each other at the east end of the facility. Another reactor inhabits the containment dome seen at the northern most part of the lab.

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