Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station

Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station was a nuclear power plant in Rowe, Massachusetts, that operated from 1960 to 1992. The 185-megawatt electric pressurized-water plant, located on the Deerfield River in the town of Rowe in western Massachusetts, tight on the border of Readsboro, Vermont, permanently shut down on February 26, 1992, after more than 31 years of producing electricity for New England electric consumers.Most of the men and women who worked either in the plant or during the decommissioning efforts referred to the site as "Yankee-Rowe" or simply "Rowe", to avoid confusion with Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power station located in nearby Vernon, Vermont.FirstsYankee Nuclear Power Station was the third commercial nuclear power plant built in the United States and the first built in New England. According to several sources Yankee Rowe was the first commercial pressurized water reactor operating in the United States. This view discounts the government-sponsored Shippingport Atomic Power Station, which was not built on a commercial basis and relied on several technologies that would not be embraced by the commercial operators. The Dresden Generating Station, a commercial boiling water reactor, slightly preceded the opening of Yankee Rowe in 1960. US government sources place the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at Dresden-1 on 15 October 1959 and the first one at Yankee Rowe on 19 August 1960. Yankee Rowe began commercial operation in 1961.