Oldbury Power Station virtual tour DVD image
Mentor Digital has just created and delivered 250 DVDs of Oldbury Nuclear Power Station. The DVDs contain 10 interactive virtual tours of various areas within the power plant and written descriptions. They will be sent out to local schools to give them a taste of the workings of a nuclear power plant. The communications team at Oldbury were so pleased with the result that they submitted the DVD to the regional CIPR Pride awards 2010.
Amazingly the Oldbury station was built in 1967 and has produced electricity around the clock since then. On a typical day it will supply 435MW of electricity – enough to serve a city one and a half times the size of Bristol.
Oldbury is due to enter its decommissioning programme shortly and to ensure staff are kept informed about decisions involving decommissioning for the last 6 months Mantor Digital have been producing regular intranet vodcasts for Magnox North (the company who run Oldbury Power Station). These online videos aim to maximise internal communications between Magnox North management and their 480 odd employees on the Oldbury site during the transition to the power station’s defuelling phase and the start of its decommissioning programme. The videos enable managers to address staff in an honest, frank and engaging way, there is also the opportunity for staff to offer their feedback through the microsite Mentor built to host the videos. The vodcasts have enabled a greater level of communication and staff interaction across the whole site and we will be continuing to produce them throughout the year.
Oldbury Power Station virtual tour DVD image 2
Despite the high levels of security and rigorous safety measures in place at the site as part of the filming process we have been able to access many areas of the plant that the public normally wouldn’t be able to see including getting on the pile cap of the two reactors. The control room looks like something from the original Star Trek series, a schoolboys dream with knobs, levers and buttons on every available surface. The Turbine Hall is huge and really noisy (we all had to wear ear protection), it contains a 70 tonne, cylindrical electro-magnet – rotated by the steam at 1500 revolutions per minute! The cooling ponds area is not an employee spa but where the used fuel elements are stored in water to allow any short lived radioactivity to decay before they are taken off site. This is not a pond you would like to swim in!
To get a better idea of the inner workings of Oldbury nuclear power station you can see the virtual tours on their website or by clicking HERE
