Nine days after that windy day and Dungeness is still not actually producing and electricity! You don't ever get 1.1GW of wind power stopping completely for nine days on the trot.
But now it emerges that earlier in the year the place had been shut down while they improved flood defences without telling us. And we thought the Japanese nuclear industry were secretive!
The energy giant EDF has been accused of playing down the threat of flooding at Dungeness after it emerged that one of the nuclear power plant’s reactors was quietly shut down for five months last year after experts identified risk of a Fukushima-style disaster.
EDF closed the reactor on the Kent coast on 22 May to allow work on a new flood protection wall, after alerting the Office of Nuclear Regulation that without urgent work the site was at risk of being inundated by sea water.
The reactor – which should provide power for about 750,000 homes – did not reopen again until 15 October.
The closure of the 550-megawatt reactor – one of two at Dungeness – followed an internal EDF report which found that the shingle bank sea defences were “not as robust as previously thought”, raising fears that they could be overwhelmed in extreme weather, according to the ClickGreen website, which first reported the closure.
The operators of the Dungeness nuclear power station were forced to shut down a reactor last year because of a Fukushima-style flood scare, ClickGreen can reveal.
French utility firm EDF Energy, currently in charge of the Hinkley nuclear power project, was ordered to shut down the reactor at Dungeness B for five months while it corrected botched work to sea defence fortifications.
The news was not published by the company or the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) but details were found buried in obscure files of the Health and Safety Executive.
Given the sinking East coast, melting ice sheets and increased storm surges, it is obviously only a matter of time before the local defences are overwhelmed. I expect the the reactors will have been shut down and fuel shipped out before that happens, but the core will still be deeply radioactive for many decades before at can be decommissioned. Widespread contamination is inevitable in the long run.
If I wasn't veggie already, I would then give up eating fish.
I fear that extensions will continue to be granted as replacement stations fail to appear more or less indefinitely until something totally unexpected and unpredictable happens that causes a major radiation leak, at which point we will be so far down the curve that we just have to get on with life as best we can.
Entropy never sleeps and all systems fail sooner or later.
I don't think 'more or less indefinitely' is technically possible as what happens is the graphite in the core loses mass. Just how much loss can be tolerated is debatable, 6% or 8% or whatever, but there must come a time when one has to stop.
Hartleypool and Heysham shut down as faults are investigated. Nuclear o/p on GridWatch welly-o-meter down to about 5 GW from the usual 7.5.
The reactors will be shut down over the next few days and are expected to remain shut for about eight weeks. They will only be allowed to reopen when EDF has convinced the ONR it has "an acceptable safety case".
