Littlebrook may not be as huge as some of the stations dotted around the UK, but it's certainly much bigger than it looks from the Dartford Crossing. With the UK's fourth tallest chimney and an output of over 2 gigawatts it's certainly no baby. It pops up on here from time to time with various areas being covered individually, so here I’m aiming to bring together everything from a few visits to the site into one report, covering the entire site.
Photos are from various visits with @SpiderMonkey, A Window to yesterday and @PROJ3CTM4YH3M between 2015 - 2017.
Littlebrook C on the left, B central and A to the right
Image of all 4 power stations in the snow, as seen on display in the D station control room
Plan of the site showing the general arrangement of buildings
And an aerial view showing how the plan translates to real life
A Station
The coal-fired ‘A’ station was the first power station at Littlebrook. Built by the Kent Electric Power Company, it opened in 1939. The station was later converted to burn supplementary oil over coal, and remained in use until 1973. The station had six coal-fired boilers, 3 chain grate and 3 pulverised fuel. The steam raised in the boilers was fed to three steam receivers which in turn supplied three steam turbine generators. Two of the turbines were supplied by CA Parsons at 30 MW each driving a directly coupled air cooled alternator running at 3000 rpm. The third turbine was supplied by BTH running at 1500 rpm driving a 4-pole air cooled alternator. In its last years the 1500 4 pole alternator was decoupled from its turbine and used as a synchronous compensator thereby providing voltage regulation to its local grid.
The A station viewed from the air
One of the A station's three 30MW turbines
Facility for Reactor Engineering and Development (FRED)
The ‘A’ and ‘B’ stations had been used by Nuclear Electric, later to become BNFL as a training and development centre.
Magnox reactors were designed to be maintenance-free during their operational lifetime, however development of new techniques for working on them needed to take place before attempting new procedures on live reactors. This is where FRED came in - the Facility for Reactor Engineering and Development, where reactor inspection and repair rehearsal rigs were constructed. This is a mock-up of the reactors at Bradwell nuclear power station, used during the development of robotic equipment.
A range of mock-up nuclear reactors had been built, the ‘A’ station containing mock-ups of the reactors at Sizewell, Bradwell and Dungeness ‘A’ power stations.
Overview of the turbine hall containing the mock-up reactors
Mock-up of the reactors at Bradwell A Nuclear Power Station
Mock-up of Sizewell A reactor shell
Looking down on the Sizewell Shell
Rear of the Sizewell shell
View at the top of the rig
Some of the disused offices were suffering a lot of decay
Continued...
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