Reactor Room Tiles

The tiles on the floor of the reactor room at White Bay Power Station have failed across part of the floor, lifting and cracking where moisture has worked through the concrete underneath. Where the tiles are intact, the pattern is the standard hexagonal cement tile of mid-twentieth-century industrial flooring: small honeycomb sections in a uniform pale colour, set in a matrix of darker grout. Where they have failed, the underlying concrete is exposed, the lift pattern showing the path of the failure across the floor. The reactor housings around the room are still in place: their ceramic insulators, their hand-painted labels, their steel cabinets.

The reactor room held the high-voltage current-limiting reactors of the plant's switchgear. The tiled floor was specified for industrial environments where electrical safety and ease of cleaning both mattered. White Bay was built across three phases from 1912 to 1948; the reactor room dates from one of the later expansions. The plant closed on Christmas Day 1983 and the room was de-energised. The tiles have failed progressively in the four decades since, with each failure cycle expanding the area of exposed concrete. The reactor housings themselves have stayed in place.