Letter to the Hunterston Site Stakeholder Group - 6 Aug 2020

6 August 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. The ONR is continuing its assessment into the Hunterston B return to service case, using the information EDF has provided after extensive rounds of modelling and analysis.

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. We have been in discussions with the Graphite Team on safety case progress and have concluded that the current trading dates for Reactor 3 needs to be pushed back 10 days to the 30 August. 

Reactor 4 came offline in mid-December 2019, following a four month run of safe and reliable generation. We aim to return the unit to service on 17 September 2020, there is no change to this date at present.

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