Hunterston ‘B’ is on course to operate safely until 2023, station direction Colin Weir has told stakeholders at a public meeting on nuclear issues.
On January 13 this year, Reactor 3 was taken offline for its planned interim outage for 22 days.
Colin Weir stated: “As well as excellent safety performance with no nuclear, environment or industrial safety top tier events or accidents, we successfully completed several maintenance activities and inspections during the outage.
“The main purpose was to build up our understanding on the graphite core ageing process. Our findings underlined that the graphite in our reactors is behaving as experts predicted.
This latest inspection monitored the three graphite bricks within which cracks had been found in November 2015. As predicted, there has been no significant increase in their size since the last outage.
“Our modelling predicted that the most probable outcome of this inspection was that we would see between three and eight additional keyway root cracks. The results were within these predictions and we found three additional keyway root cracks. These results at this stage in the reactor life are within safety case margins and do not change our confidence that we can operate safely to 2023.
“Nuclear safety drives everything we do and our reactors are operated with very large safety margins. The level of cracking which is considered reasonable is far below anything which would affect the reactor’s safe operation. Safety cases assessed by the independent nuclear regulator, our own approach to safety and inspection programmes ensure that the reactor cores remain safe throughout their full life.”