British Energy Sizewell B2 nuclear plant off line

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

LONDON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - The B2 turbine at British Energy's Sizewell nuclear power plant was offline on Monday morning, a website operated by the National Grid showed.

The unit in southeast England has capacity of 594 MW.

A spokesperson at British Energy said the outage was due to unplanned problems with its turbines and not with the reactor.

Both the B1 and B2 turbines at the Sizewell plant -- the country's only pressurised water reactor (PWR), which has one reactor and two turbines -- tripped late on Saturday.

While the B1 turbine has been back in service since early on Monday, B2 is still out of service, the spokesperson said.

"We returned one turbine to service just after midnight this morning...Turbine 2, we are working on a restart plan. As usual, we wouldn't confirm when it is going to come back," she said.

Posted in |