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LONDON (Reuters) – Fire crews have brought under control a fire that started late on Sunday at Britain’s Didcot B Power Station, about 70 miles (113 km) west of London, operator RWE npower said.
“Emergency services are still on site but the fire is under control, ” a spokeswoman for RWE npower told Reuters on Monday.
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Nobody has been injured in the blaze, the operator said earlier.
The fire broke out in one of the cooling towers, the BBC reported earlier on its website, citing Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue.
“I’ve been reassured by National Grid that there is no risk to electricity supplies, ” Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, said in a statement.
“My priority is to understand the cause of the fire and get the affected unit back generating electricity as soon as it’s safe to do so, ” he added.
According to RWE’s website, one 720-MW unit at the site, Didcot B5, has been taken offline. The other unit, Didcot B6, appears to still be in service.
Didcot B can produce 1, 360 megawatts of electricity, enough power to meet the needs of 1 million households. It is one of a new generation of highly efficient, gas-burning power stations, which has been in commercial operation since 1997, RWE says on its website.
(Reporting by Kate Holton, Nina Chestney and Karolin Schaps; editing by Susan Thomas)
