FEATURE
Upgrade – a big part of the scheduled works is to exchange the 76-tonne rotor within Turbine Generator 1, which was last replaced in 2007. grins as they walk around the frankly incredible engineering on show.
Although the Turbine Hall is amazing, it must work unbelievably hard. It’ s here the megawatts of power are generated and exported, where the turbines turn far too fast to comprehend and you can almost feel the hum and buzz in the air.
Given all that, it’ s no surprise it needs extra special care and attention. To do this, every 18 months or so we shut down one of our reactors to undertake inspections, maintenance and upgrades right across every aspect of the plant’ s systems. From reactor inspections to replacing part of our giant turbines.
These periods are special times onsite. This is when our teams, who relish a challenge, spend weeks painstakingly taking apart giant pieces of kit that are normally busy and uninterruptable.
We then inspect, maintain, upgrade and generally lavish attention on the areas of the plant we’ ve scheduled for overhaul.
After that the next job is to put everything back together and make sure it functions exactly, as they saying goes, as it says on the tin.
This may sound straight forward but it’ s anything but. Hartlepool Power Station is more than 40-years-old. Parts of the plant have been replaced countless times and are regularly altered and updated.
Other parts have been doing their job since the station started generating in 1983 and need the attention of skilled engineers to keep doing the functions they’ re designed for.
During this outage, one of the big tasks will be to replace the rotor within Turbine Generator 1.
This 76-tonne part was last replaced in 2007. Since then, it has been noisily spinning away at 3,000 rotations per minute, whenever the reactor it is connected to, has been generating electricity.
So, doing the maths, the rotor has spun more than 20 billion times since being installed.
But its time has come to an end, and during this outage our engineers and specialist turbine partners, Arabelle Solutions, will be taking out the giant piece of kit and replacing it with an overhauled generator rotor that has been taken from Hinkley Point B power station as they no longer need this major part.
As enormous as this piece of work is, it’ s just one of thousands of work packages teams onsite will deliver during the outage.
As well as this, we will also inspect the graphite core, carry out maintenance across the four giant boilers and cooling water systems and of course put new nuclear fuel into the reactor.
The scope of work to be completed means our dedicated station teams cannot deliver it alone.
Instead, we call on talented engineers and skilled nuclear industry workers from all over the country to help us deliver the outage.
And what that means in practical terms is hundreds of people heading to Hartlepool to complete the job.
During their time on Teesside, they’ ll almost all need places to stay, places to unwind and places to eat.
Because of that it is estimated that a power station outage brings a multi-million pound boost to the area, every time they’ re delivered.
After this outage is complete the station will switch back to generating the megawatts it does day in, day out – and things will head back to normal.
But, in doing so, the station can be assured it has done all it can to set itself up for a long generating run, whilst providing the Tees area with a welcome boost.
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