HUNTERSTON B owners EDF have confirmed that defuelling is now underway.

Operators at the nuclear power plant, which was switched off for the last time at the turn of the year, started the job of removing spent nuclear fuel from the reactors earlier this week.

The station stopped generating zero-carbon electricity in January.

Since then the workforce has been carrying out a statutory outage to ensure the two units are ready for the next stage in the nuclear lifecycle.

The first fuel stringer, a 10 metre long assembly of fuel pins and other component parts, has been removed from Reactor 3, four months after the site came offline.

Defuelling – removing all the used nuclear fuel – is an extension of the refuelling operation, which has been taking place at the station for more than 40 years.

The first flask of spent fuel to leave site since reactor emptying started has also been dispatched to Sellafield.

Over the next three years, the station will send around 350 of these to the facility in Cumbria for processing and safe storage.

Defuelling will remove 99 per cent of the nuclear material from the site before it is handed over to the NDA for its subsidiary Magnox to carry on with decommissioning.