Wolf Creek Generating Station is a nuclear power plant located near Burlington, Kansas. It occupies 9,818 acres of the total 11800 acre controlled by the owner. Its namesake, Wolf Creek, was dammed to create Coffey County Lake (formerly Wolf Creek Lake), and provides water for the condensers.

History

Construction started on May 30, 1977 and it was commissioned on September 3, 1985, at a cost of US$5.771 billion (in 2007 value). This plant has one Westinghouse pressurized water reactor that came online on June 4, 1985. The reactor was rated at 1,170 MW(e). A new turbine generator rotor was installed in 2011 that increased electrical output to approximately 1250 MW(e). The reactor output remained unchanged at 3565 MW (th). On October 4, 2006, the operator applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a renewal and extension of the plant's operating license. The NRC granted the renewal on November 20, 2008, extending the license from forty years to sixty. On January 13, 2012, at 2 p.m., due to a breaker failure and an unexplained loss of power to an electrical transformer, the plant experienced an automatic reactor trip and loss of offsite power that lasted 3 hours. The nuclear plant was a target of an unsuccessful cyberattack by hackers in 2017, leading to indictments in 2021. FSB's 16th Center military unit 71330 associated Russian hacker groups Energetic Bear, Berserk Bear and Crouching Yeti were associated with the attacks at Wolf Creek.

Ownership

The Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, a Delaware corporation, operates the power plant. The ownership is divided between the Evergy (94%), and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative, Inc. (6%).

Surrounding population

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 10 mi, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination, and an ingestion pathway zone of about 50 mi, concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U.S. population within 10 mi of Wolf Creek was 5,466, a decrease of 2.8 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for msnbc.com. The 2010 U.S. population within 50 mi was 176,656, a decrease of 1.7 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Emporia (30 miles to city center).

Seismic risk

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Wolf Creek was 0.0019%, or 1 in 55,556, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.