EDF has confirmed that six out of the nine nuclear reactors in the UK are presently offline for maintenance.
This outage constitutes 58% of the country’s nuclear power capacity, with 3.5GW out of the total 6GW temporarily out of operation, according to the Nuclear Industry Association.
As of Wednesday, the UK relies heavily on gas for 59% of its electricity, with wind contributing 15%, nuclear 6% and the rest sourced from biomass, solar and coal.
A few days ago, Energy Live News reported that during its busiest week in at least a year, Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station contributed 3.4% to the nation’s electricity production on Monday.
The unplanned outages affecting four reactors, two each in Heysham and Hartlepool, were prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire.
An EDF spokesperson said: “Following the failure of part of a steam valve in the Heysham 1 boiler pipework, EDF has taken a proactive decision to temporarily take the station offline, as well as its ‘sister station’ at Hartlepool that has the same valve design.”
