EDF has said offshore work to install an underwater cooling water system for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is moving into its final stages.
Two huge jack-up vessels have arrived off the coast of the plant in Somerset to install six vertical shafts which will help connect six miles of tunnels on the seabed of the Bristol Channel to the facility’s nuclear reactors. Regarded as one of the world’s most complex marine engineering projects – owing to the Bristol Channel having the second-highest tidal range on the planet - 5,000-tonne intake and outfall heads for the system were placed on the seabed last summer.
The new components will be installed at a depth of more than 20 metres. Miners will then dig a horizontal connection between the bottom of the shaft and the tunnel, in order to link in the intake and outfall heads, which are designed to circulate the cooling water to the plant’s two nuclear reactors. The vessels, the 132 metre-long Neptune and the 60 metre-long Sea Challenger, have a combined lifting capacity of 1,500 tonnes.
