China takes a bigger role at Hinkley as nuclear reactor pressure rises
EDF executives suppressed horror as their Chinese partners made a risky suggestion.
Senior engineers from China General Nuclear (CGN) proposed a way to lift a concrete dome on to the reactor at Hinkley Point C in Somerset. According to EDF sources, their plan would have entailed dangling the 270-tonne structure over more than 5,000 workers on site at the time.
CGN staff pointed to how the move had been successfully executed at Taishan, a nuclear power plant built by the two companies in China.
“That was in China, not the UK,” one executive recalls thinking, before the idea was rebuffed as far too dangerous.
Yet CGN has played a far greater role in the planning and construction of Hinkley than previously disclosed, according to a Sunday Telegraph review of company documents and interviews with insiders. As security concerns over Chinese involvement in critical infrastructure are escalated by diplomatic tensions, a project meant to herald a new era of cooperation on nuclear energy faces renewed scrutiny....
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