Operators at the EDF site have taken one of the station's two reactors offline on to carry out a major maintenance programme worth more than £25 million. This planned 74-day outage will allow work to be carried out that cannot take place while the reactor is at power. It is a statutory requirement to carry out a maintenance outage every 3 years to allow continued generation of zero carbon electricity from the reactor.
-- Advertisement --
More than 800 extra workers will join the 750 strong workforce for the maintenance period, which is known as a 'statutory outage'.
EDF carries out a statutory outage on each of its reactors every three years. These are planned in advance with the National Grid to ensure that there is no impact on the national electricity supply. The other reactor at Heysham 2 and the two units at Heysham 1 are due to continue operating normally throughout the period.
During the outage workers will carry out more than 13,000 separate pieces of work – each carefully planned during the last two years of preparation. The biggest projects include gas circulator exchanges, turbine low pressure stage rotor replacement, and graphite inspections.
