South Texas Project, My Home Plant.

I mentioned that I would write about the history of South Texas Project in a future post. Well, it turns out we live in the future! I N C E P T I O N .

The reservoir on the left, with Unit 2 and Unit 1 RCBs sticking up like boobs.

South Texas Project is located in the middle of nowhere off of FM Rd 521 in Matagorda County. The nearest towns are my wife's hometown of Wadsworth (a town of less than 200 people), Palacios (a town without even a Wal-Mart), Matagorda (a beach town with basically no other reason to exist), and Bay City, where we live.

The actual site sits on over 12,000 acres of mostly undeveloped land on the Colorado River, including a 7,000 acre reservoir constructed for the plant . This undeveloped area is preserved as a protected habitat for many birds, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons.

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Planning started in 1971 for the two reactor units and construction was started on December 22, 1975. Unit 1 reached criticality on March 8, 1988 (exactly 5 months before my wife was born) and Unit 2 reached criticality on March 12 of the following year.

The site consists generally of 3 areas, broken into further parts. The majority of the site is the Owner-Controlled Area where administrative offices, welding shops, as well as the wildlife areas and the reservoir exist.

Without getting too into details (for legal reasons, mainly), the second area is the fenced-in Protected Area where the mechanics of the plant, such as the Turbine Generator Building and the Electrical, Mechanical and I&C shops lay. This area requires higher access (for obvious reasons) and is monitored by armed security.

The third, and most-controlled, area is the Vital Area where the Reactor Containment, Mechanical Auxiliary, and Electrical Auxiliary buildings are located. This is the heart of the plant and the home of the Radiologically Controlled Area.

There could be said to be a fourth section, if one was to count the Control Room. That requires special access and is very interesting. I was lucky enough to have access to the Control Room for ~2 months after my first outage. It is an experience I will never forget. The room is filled with some of the most important figures in the unit, mainly sitting at computers and looking at the hundreds of gauges, switches, and dials that run the main systems of the plant. It really is like it is shown in the movies: tense, quiet, and awe-inspiring.

Each Unit has a 1250 MW Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor. I will explain how the reactors work and the differences between PWR and Boiling Water Reactors in the next post. These two units produce an average of 22,139 GW-hours of electricity each year. That is the most electricity produced by a two-unit plant in the country since 2004.

Needless to say, that is a lot of power; enough to power 2 million Texas homes every year. That's about 6-7 million people, or roughly 25-28% of Texans. All from a single plant. If that's not amazing, I don't know what is.

In the Beginning...

Welcome to my new nuclear blog. I hope to show what it is like to work in such an interesting industry, as well as teach a few people some things about nuclear power and dispel the numerous myths that have emerged over the last 40 years.

My name is Doug De Vos. Some might have read my Cooking and Taxes blog, others may have not. I am a native Texan, currently living in a small Texas town near the coast where my wife grew up. This county possesses a 2-reactor nuclear power plant known as the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station, run by STP Nuclear Operating Company. A post with the history of this plant is forthcoming, so have no fear.

My wife has been an employee of STPNOC for a year and a half as an Apprentice Instrumentations and Controls Technician, having worked an internship previously, as well as two outages (a term to be explained) with the company for which I now work.


To give a very brief introduction to how my employment started and how it works at a nuclear power plant, I'll start by saying that after Jessie worked one outage, we decided it would be better to get married and live near STPEGS. In December 2009, we moved to a 2-bedroom apartment here in Bay City and prepared to work the upcoming outage.

An outage (also known as a shutdown) is any time one of the units at STP shuts down and no longer is producing power. These can be scheduled refuel outages or forced outages due to necessary repairs or accidents. Refuel outages occur (at STP) every 18 months for each unit. This creates a 3 year turnaround cycle for scheduled outages.

Jessie had worked the Unit 1 Reactor Vessel Head Replacement Outage in the fall of 2009 and we moved shortly after. The Unit 2 RVHRO was the following spring and she was returning with the company she had worked with, Bartlett Nuclear, Inc. I needed a job as well, so I applied with the housekeeping/firewatch company, GCA Services.


To make a long story short, I worked the 2-month outage doing decontamination mopping inside of containment, then worked for 2 more months as a sort of mid-range supervisor before leaving for medical problems.

If you have read my mentioned blog, I then worked a season as a tax professional and missed an outage, bringing us to the refuel outage of Unit 2 in October 2011.