This Is What Britain’s Biggest Construction Project Looks Like

This Is What Britain’s Biggest Construction Project Looks Like

(Bloomberg) -- Britain’s biggest construction project is emerging from the ancient flatlands in the west, overlooking the sea where humans have lived for more than 10,000 years.

Over an area covering 245 soccer fields, Electricite de France SA is building the U.K.’s first new nuclear power plant in more than 20 years. The project employs 4,500 people and will cost up to 22.5 billion pounds ($28 billion), a sum the French utility boosted this week after discovering more difficult conditions on the ground. 

Still at least five years away from producing electricity, the Hinkley Point C near Bridgwater near where the River Parrett empties into the sea will feed enough electricity for 6 million homes. In addition to being the largest and most advanced infrastructure project in the country, it’s generated a number of superlatives that highlight the scale of the work underway. 

It included the largest single pour of concrete in the U.K., taking 240 hours to put 9,000 cubic meters of the material into a nest of steel reinforcement bars.

More recently, EDF installed “Big Carl” at the site. The world’s largest crane towers 250 meters overhead, moving along 6 kilometers of track powered by 12 engines. The crane operated by Sarens NV of Belgium arrived on 280 trucks and took about  three months to erect.

Once finished, Hinkley will contain 3 million tons of concrete and 50,000 tons of structural steel, enough to build a railway line between London and Rome. Two tunnels out to sea feeding water for cooling are more than 7 meters in diameter, drilled with the same machines that bored a new subway line in London. The pipes will be capable of filling an Olympic-sized swimming pool in 20 seconds.

The U.K. government has put nuclear at the center of effort to attract billions of pounds of investment in new power plants as old reactors are retired in the coming years. Many see nuclear as key to the country’s low carbon future as fossil fuels are gradually phased out, but the technology is facing stiff competition from renewable energy, including offshore wind where prices are plunging. 

EDF says that once Hinkley produces energy, using the nuclear power instead of traditional alternatives will prevent some 600 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. EDF’s own assessment of the lifetime emissions of Hinkley – that is the carbon emitted right through construction to retirement – is 4.8 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, 35% of which will come in the construction phase.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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