British Energy is celebrating the return to service of North Ayrshire's Hunterston B nuclear power station, and achievement of the target of reaching 70% power generation on both units - sufficient for the needs of some one million homes.

In what has been the company's largest maintenance programme ever, significant boiler inspection and repairs were carried out on both reactors.

The work on Hunterston B reactor 3 was completed in May this year with power output increased from around 59% to 70%. Reactor 4 returned to service on August 16. The unit was running at around 61% before this outage and has now also successfully achieved 70% output.

During the three-month Reactor 4 outage the station achieved best ever safety performance with no injuries or accidents, or reportable environmental or nuclear events.

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A £13.7m investment was made on replacing turbine rotors, pipework and general maintenance.

A total of 163,321 man hours of specialist boiler inspection training was completed for both outages

Hunterston B has produced more than 217 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity generation since first supplying the National Grid in 1976 - that's enough electricity to power the whole of Scotland, for a year, six times over.

The company is developing strategies for raising load beyond 70% in the future although no timescales are agreed yet.

Hunterston B provides 528 full time jobs and injects £30m into the local economy through staff wages, as well as spending around £58m on other costs last year.

During its 32 years' operation so far the station has avoided around 140m tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere. To get the same annual carbon avoided benefit would require the entire population of Edinburgh to reduce their carbon emissions to almost zero.

British Energy's Chief Executive, Bill Coley, praised the staff who have successfully brought the station through its challenging programme. He said: "I commend everyone at Hunterston B and the entire British Energy team who has supported them.

"This has been the largest outage British Energy has conducted and getting these units up to 70% load is testament to all the investment we are putting into the plants, improving our human performance and work processes and further enhancing our nuclear safety culture."

Station director Mark Gorry said: "We are delighted to see the units achieving 70% output as planned, and it's down to great teamwork by everyone involved."

(GK/JM)