California will be the site of two small nuclear power plants, which will be among the first to furnish electricity for distribution by public utility companies. Each will include an experimental reactor intended to give design information for a much larger one elsewhere.
One of these reactors is the sodium graphite reactor being built for the Atomic Energy Commission by the Atomics International Division of North American Aviation, Inc., as part of the Commission's five-year reactor development program. As previously announced (see this JOURNAL, Vol. 261, p. 239), the surplus heat from this reactor is to be used to generate steam.
The Atomic Energy Commission has authorized Atomics International to enter into an agreement with the Southern California Edison Company for the addition of electric generating equipment to the reactor. Southern California Edison is to design, construct, and operate, at no cost to the government, a heat exchanger and turbogenerator with an electrical capacity of about 7500 kilowatts. Edison's investment in this equipment will be over $1,000,000; and Atomics International is contributing $2,500,000 to the reactor project itself.
The electricity from this reactor will be fed over Edison lines to consumers in the Santa Susana area (northwest of Los Angeles) in the summer of 1956. The experience from this operation will be applied to the design of a full-sized control station plant, producing 75,000 kilowatts of electrical power, which Atomics International is to build for the Consumers Public Power District of Nebraska, following completion of negotiations that have been authorized by the AEC.
The second California reactor was announced by the General Electric Company on March 1. It has entered into an agreement with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for the operation of a nuclear power plant in the Livermore-Pleasanton area, 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. The announcement emphasized that this reactor, which is to be completed during 1957, will be the first to be financed entirely by private capital. It is expected to cost between $3-and $4-million. This reactor will be a pilot plant for G. E.'s innovation of a dualcycle boiling water reactor. (See this JOURNAL, Vol. 260, p. 132.) Its initial generating capacity is to be 5000 kilowatts and its ultimate capacity 10,000 kilowatts. This experimental reactor will provide information of extreme value in the development of the large dual-553