Letter to the Hunterston Site Stakeholder Group - 2 July 2020

2 July 2020

Dear SSG Member,

As a member of our community, I wanted to keep you updated on any developments at the power station.

As outlined at the June meeting of the SSG, the safety cases for both Reactors 3 and 4 have been submitted to the ONR for their assessment.

We continue to respond to any questions coming from the ONR’s ongoing review of the Hunterston B safety case. Since work started on the revised case, the ONR has challenged our
assumptions and evidence in a number of areas. We welcome this and have carried out additional rounds of modelling and analysis to answer these questions. The ONR is continuing its assessment using the latest information provided.

In the last few years, EDF has invested over £200million in understanding the likely impacts on the graphite reactor under a range of worse case scenarios, including up to a 1 in 10,000 year seismic event, much larger than the UK has ever experienced. We remain confident that we would be able to shut down the reactor in all such scenarios.

As you are aware, market rules require us to give our most likely view of return to service dates. To support time for the ONR’s assessment we have revised our latest expectation for its return to service to 20 Aug – previously we expected it to return on 13 July.

Reactor 4 came offline in mid-December, following a four month run of safe and reliable generation. We now aim to return the unit to service on 17 September 2020 – previously we expected it to return on 27 July.

I hope this information is useful to you as a member of the Site Stakeholder Group. Should you wish to ask any questions please feel free to ring the Station on 01294 826000 and ask for our Communications Officer, Nikki Thomson.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Forrest
Station Director