LaSalle County Nuclear Generating Station, located 11 miles (18 km) southeast of Ottawa, Illinois serves Chicago and northern Illinois with electricity. The plant is owned and operated by the Exelon Corporation. Its Units 1 and 2 began commercial operation in August 1982 and April 1984, respectively.
It has two General Electric boiling water reactors. LaSalle's Unit 1 is capable of generating 1200 net megawatts, while Unit 2 is capable of generating 1200 net megawatts, together generating a total of 2,400 net megawatts which is enough electricity to support the electricity needs of more than two million average American homes. Instead of cooling towers, the station has a 2,058 acres (833 ha) man-made cooling lake, which is also a popular fishery — LaSalle Lake State Fish and Wildlife Area — managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
LaSalle County Station units 1 and 2 currently holds the world record top two spots for run time without shutting down for boiling water reactors, 739 and 712 days respectively. Both cycles were breaker to breaker.
Read more about LaSalle County Nuclear Generating Station: Surrounding Population, Site Area Emergency, Seismic Risk
Famous quotes containing the words county, nuclear and/or station:
“It would astonish if not amuse, the older citizens of your County who twelve years ago knew me a stranger, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat—at ten dollars per month to learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Could it not be that just at the moment masculinity has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction or ecological suicide, women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother’s call to save her planet and create instead the next stage of evolution? Can our revolution mean anything else than the reversion of social and economic control to Her representatives among Womankind, and the resumption of Her worship on the face of the Earth? Do we dare demand less?”
—Jane Alpert (b. 1947)
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)