24 Mar (NucNet): One of the two gas-cooled reactor units at EDF Energy’s Dungeness B nuclear power station in southern England has been taken offline in readiness for a major planned maintenance outage.
EDF Energy said the cost of the maintenance outage at the 607-megawatt B-1 unit will be 25 million pounds (GBP) (30 million euros, 40 million US dollars) and involve more than 12,000 separate pieces of work.
Major plant investment projects include the inspection of the turbine rotors and a programme to inspect the fuel channels on the reactor.
Martin Pearson, Dungeness B station director, said the programme of work being carried out is “huge”. He said the significant investment shows EDF Energy’s confidence in the future of the station.
The outage comes as the company prepares to decide on extending the station’s operating lifetime by 10 years to 2028. Dungeness B-1 began commercial operation in 1985 and Dungeness B-2 in 1989.
EDF Energy said last week that it had made a “conservative decision” to take both Dungeness B reactors offline for two months in May 2013 to further improve flooding defences.
In a statement issued in response to a report in a national newspaper claiming that EDF Energy had “played down the threat” of flooding at the station, the company said the decision to take both reactors offline was to undertake additional protection to cover “extremely rare events” of the kind that might happen only one in 10,000 years.
