The UK’s Oldbury 2 magnox reactor has recommenced commercial operations after an almost two year outage that was followed by a fire and turbine vibrations.

After commencing a statutory outage in June 2005, unit 2 was not able to restart until May 2007, due mainly to the time taken to demonstrate that core graphite depletion would not affect safety during operation. Following its May 2007 restart, the unit went offline again on 30 May due to a generator transformer fire. Repairs were completed by the end of June but the unit was shut down again on 3 July due to turbine vibrations. The unit has been back online since 24 August using the turbine associated with unit 1, which has been offline since the end of August 2006. As with its sister unit, concerns over graphite depletion have delayed the restart of unit 1.

Both units are due to close permanently in December 2008.


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