Hartlepool nuclear power station is a nuclear power station situated on the northern bank of the mouth of the River Tees, south of Hartlepool in County Durham, North East England. The station has a net electrical output of 1,185megawatts, which is 2% of Great Britain's peak electricity demand of 60GW. Electricity is produced through the use of two advanced gas-cooled reactors (AGR). Hartlepool was only the third nuclear power station in the United Kingdom to use AGR technology. It was also the first nuclear power station to be built close to a major urban area. Originally planned in 1967, with construction starting in 1969, the station started generating electricity in 1983, and was completed in 1985, initially being operated by the Central Electricity Generating Board. With privatisation of the UK's electric supply industry in 1990, the station has been owned by Nuclear Electric and British Energy, but is now owned and operated by EDF Energy. On 18 October 2010 the British government announced that Hartlepool was one of the eight sites it considered suitable for future nuclear power stations. The power station will cease power generation in 2024, prior to defueling and decommissioning. History After building the first operational advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) nuclear power station at Dungeness, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) proposed their third AGR station in 1967 to be situated on the edge of the Durham coalfield, near the seaside resort of Seaton Carew. The proposal came at a time when the CEGB's move toward fuels alternative to coal threatened the coal industry's existence. Despite this, and a short ministerial delay, the plans for the Seaton Carew station (which became known as Hartlepool nuclear power station) went ahead. Because the construction of the station was given the go ahead, the National Coal Board were not able to get the CEGB behind the plans for a prototype fluidised bed combustion (FBC) coal station at Grimethorpe in Yorkshire. Because of this, the UK did not build FBC technology. Sited from Seaton Carew, and in the middle of the industrial complex of Teesside, the station was to be built closer to any major urban area than any nuclear power station site had been. To make this acceptable, the station's reactors were to be housed in prestressed concrete pressure vessels. The construction of the power station which was undertaken by Nuclear Design & Construction ('NDC'), a consortium backed by English