The debate over how much new nuclear power the UK should rely on as it moves away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner forms of electricity generation has been stoked by the short-term outages.
According to the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), this indicates that 58% of the UK’s nuclear power capacity is missing, with 3.5GW of the 6GW total temporarily unavailable for use.
As of Wednesday, 59% of the electricity in the UK came from gas, 15% from wind, 6% from nuclear power, and the remaining 6% from biomass, solar power, and coal.
The industry contends that the UK needs more nuclear plants because of the outages and its aging fleet, following the government’s announcement last week of plans to revitalize the sector.
However, critics warn that it will take several years for new nuclear power plants to start operating, and that existing ones are plagued by budget blowouts and delays.
A partial failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire caused the unplanned outages of four reactors: two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool.
A spokesperson for EDF stated: “Following the failure of part of a steam valve in the Heysham 1 boiler pipework, EDF has taken a proactive decision to temporarily take the station offline, as well as its ‘sister station’ at Hartlepool that has the same valve design.”
“This enables engineers to safely conduct inspections and for us to find a solution with the valve manufacturers.”
The problem has nothing to do with nuclear technology per se, and older plants frequently shut down for preventative maintenance to check for possible issues.
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EDF anticipates that by early February, all four reactors at both sites will be operational again.
For scheduled maintenance, which takes place a few times a year for tasks like refueling or inspections, two more reactors—one at Heysham 2 and one at Torness in east Scotland—have been shut down.
It’s expected that these two will flare up once more before the month is out.
