A total of £28 million is currently being boosted into the East Lothian economy – and the engineering supply-chain – this month and next during a 10-week shutdown at a Scottish nuclear power plant. One of the two nuclear reactors at the Torness plant, near Dunbar, has been closed for a compulsory three-yearly ‘engineering-MOT’ check since 7 April. Since then, more than 600 extra workers have joined the 750-strong standing workforce for the maintenance period, which is technically known as a “statutory outage”. The other reactor at Torness continues to operating normally throughout this shutdown. During the maintenance shutdown, workers will carry out more than 12,000 separate pieces of work – each carefully planned during the last two years of preparation. The biggest projects include inspections of the reactor vessel internals, exchange of the turbine high pressure rotor and replacement of auxiliary cooling water pipework systems.
Scottish Energy News 25th May 2017 read more »