Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many outages or other periods of unavailability of electricity generation there have been, in days, at Sizewell (B) power station in each year since 2010.

Nuclear power continues to be an important and proven source of reliable, clean energy, and as a result of this strong baseload provision, we have been able to move faster on a number of our key net zero objectives.

In 2020, nuclear power stations generated 50 TWh of electricity, which was 16% of the electricity generated in the UK. The UK has one Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) at Sizewell B, which is expected to operate until at least 2035.

A proportion of the nuclear generating capacity is likely to be unavailable at any given point due to routine inspections, maintenance, energy systems management and technical issues.

2010 – 2021: Annual number of outages and non-operational days at the UK’s Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) nuclear power station

Notes on Table

• Days non operational represents days where a reactor didn’t generate at all during a day.
• If output in a day is > 0, then the day is counted as an operational day.
• Outages represent the number of occurrences where a reactor was non-operational.
• 2021 is to 16 December 2021 only.