SIZEWELL B power station is expected to be offline for a few days for safety reasons, owner EDF said.
Workers detected low levels of oil on a reactor cooling pump and shut the reactor at 4am this morning.
EDF believes the outage will only last “a few days” and engineers are on site carrying out investigations.
A spokeswoman for EDF said: “We took the decision to take Sizewell B offline at 4am on 1 February following indications of low levels of oil on a reactor cooling pump.
“This is a conservative decision which is in line with our company ethos of putting safety first at all times.
“All indications so far suggest this will be a short outage - just a few days - however, we will know more once our highly trained engineers have examined the equipment further this morning.”
The power station was offline for several months last year after problems with a pressuriser, part of the reactor’s cooling circuit.
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