Major Sellafield supplier Wood has won a multi-million-pound contract to provide engineering and technical services to the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset.
The Hinkley Technical Support Alliance (HTSA) will see Wood provide station developers EDF Energy with full life cycle services to improve project delivery and commercial performance over the next five years.
Wood was recently awarded a 20-year contract worth up to £769 million to deliver the Design and Engineering lot for the Programme and Project Partners (PPP) framework at Sellafield – which aims to revolutionise” decommissioning at the complex site.
Wood is already a long-standing big tier company at Sellafield, and was also recently awarded one of six framework contracts to deliver the next phase of decommissioning work at the Dounreay nuclear site in Scotland.
Commenting on the new agreement to supply Hinkley Point C – the UK’s first new nuclear power station for more than 20 years – Bob MacDonald, chief executive of Wood’s Specialist Technical Solutions, said: “This positions us as a key strategic partner at Hinkley Point C, maintaining our track record of playing a key role in every UK nuclear new build project since the inception of the industry.”
Wood – which employs 1,300 people in the North West, including at Sellafield and Whitehaven – already provides similar professional services to EDF Energy Nuclear Generation under a long-term agreement to support the UK’s eight existing nuclear power stations.
Hinkley Point C is the only one of six proposed new nuclear power stations to be at the construction stage.
The £15bn Moorside development in Cumbria collapsed last year, while plans for stations at Wylfa Newydd, Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire have been mothballed.
Plans for Bradwell B in Essex and Sizewell C in Suffolk are progressing, but are years away from the construction stage.
Meanwhile, the UK is facing a significant gap in baseload zero carbon energy as the nation’s eight remaining nuclear power generating facilities begin to wind down one-by-one.
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