Friday Nuclear Matinee - Darlington Nuclear Station

Click here to launch the video!

The nuclear plant featured in this video is of the CANDU type, which is the particular model chosen for wide manufacture in Canada and which is fairly unique. While CANDU units have been successfully built in a number of other countries (directly or under contract), only in Canada is the type exclusively used. Nevertheless, this video gives a fascinating tour of facilities the public generally never sees and explains the power plant in an easy to understand way.

Fun Fact: Darlington nuclear plant has a very long turbine building (as you'll see in the video) because it is built with the turbine areas for each nuclear unit end-to-end in the same large structure. This however isn't the longest ever constructed-in the former East Germany, there was a nuclear plant of Soviet design called Greifswald, which had eight VVER-440 reactors and had a single, long turbine building that was 1.2 kilometers (3600 feet, or 7/10 of a mile) end to end. The turbine building was designed to house 16 turbine generators-the VVER-440 design used two 220 MWe (Megawatts electrical) turbine generators per reactor. Greifswald, never fully completed (Units 7 and 8 never were fully finished, Unit 6 was never started up, and Unit 5 only operated briefly) was shut down soon after the reunification of East and West Germany, and today is in advanced stages of decommissioning. The turbine building was however completed structurally and holds the record for the longest nuclear plant turbine building ever constructed anywhere.