On a sunny morning in early July 2016, the A-level physics and chemistry students scrambled aboard a coach and headed off to the UK’s newest nuclear power station – Sizewell B on the Suffolk coast. As the coach raced along the A12 towards our destination, excitement on board was clearly mounting, particularly when glimpses of the characteristic mighty airline-collision-proof sparkling white dome first came into view. Once inside the facility, the students were given a talk on the rigorous, and admittedly impressive, safety procedures in place on the site – there have been no serious accidents or injuries since the station was first commissioned in 1995 – a truly impressive statistic.
Once inside, and having been festooned with enough health and safety equipment to give an occupational therapist a heart attack – a hi-vis jacket, hard hat, radiation gloves and ear plugs to name but a few – the
students headed off to the main security check point. Having been screened, scanned, prodded and searched, we finally made it through the main turnstiles and onto the officially ‘nuclear’ part of the site.
What then followed was a fascinating 3 hour tour of the entire facility (with the exception of the nuclear reactor). Perhaps most striking of all was the sheer scale on which the electricity production takes place. The power station consisted of everything from its own on-site armed police force, to a gigantic fish filtration system. In order to provide a coolant, 13 million litres of seawater are sucked in from the neighbouring North Sea
every minute, with many unfortunate critters plucked from their cosy briny depths and involuntarily brought along for their own brief tour of Sizewell B. The facility is the only power station in
Europe that has its own in-house giant ‘fish sieving’ system; it was indeed a spectacular and rather heart-warming sight to see the likes of cod, haddock, sole and pollock whizzing by beneath our feet on an aquatic rollercoaster ride back out to sea.
The tour ended with a much needed hearty lunch, followed by a tour of the Sizewell B Visitor Centre.
As they clambered back onto the coach for the journey home, the students were visibly glowing (though fortunately not in the luminous yellow sense).
It had been a fantastic day and had certainly given us all plenty to think about in terms of nuclear power as a viable energy source for the future of our planet.