In a bid to combine efforts at the design and construction stages the Boiler and Turbo-generator plant were replicated at Fiddlers Ferry power station located in Cuerdley, Cheshire, in North West England.

It subsequently attracted visitors from around the world including Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Iran who was escorted around the site by Robert Laycock the Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire on 6 March 1965.

The opposite pairs of the lozenge group were coloured light and dark to avoid tendency of shapes to coalesce when viewed at a moderate distance.

The Civic Trust, announcing the 82 awards it made in 1968 from more than 1,400 entries from 94 counties in the United Kingdom described West Burton as "an immense engineering work of great style which, far from detracting from the visual scene, acts as a magnet to the eye from many parts of the Trent Valley".

The plant was originally operated by the CEGB and then run by National Power after privatisation, until April 1996 when it was bought by the Eastern Group which became TXU Europe.

[22] In 1977 a British Rail Class 56 locomotive was officially named in front of the coal plant control block as 'West Burton Power Station' number 56009 later re-numbered to 56201.

Prior to privatisation West Burton was the last CEGB power station to be awarded the Christopher Hinton trophy in recognition of good housekeeping.

The station had a Discovery Centre to educate local school children and also has the oldest mound of FGD gypsum in the UK, part of an experiment set up by CEGB scientists in 1988.

[27] There has been protest to the demolition of the station from campaign group The Twentieth Century Society, arguing significant pieces of Britain's industrial heritage such as West Burton A should be preserved.

[28] After it was first listed as a candidate in June 2021,[29][30] on 3 October 2022 the site was announced as the planned location for the first nuclear fusion power plant to be built under the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) programme.

Built by International Combustion, the design is similar in many respects to that of the now redundant 550 MW ICL boiler at Thorpe Marsh which had two furnaces with centre division walls.

Separated over-fire air (SOFA) burners were installed on all four of the station's units in 2007 to meet European Union nitrogen oxide emission legislation.

This provides a compact arrangement of the condenser and the main set and is a major factor in the reduction of size related to the output of the machines, which is a striking feature of the turbine hall.

This provides a pressure considerably higher than the 138 kPaG (20 PSIG) developed in the cooling water system, so that any leaks on the tube end plates will be supplied from the header tank.

The integrated structure, weighing about 2,280 tonnes in its working condition, spans the two concrete foundation blocks supporting the HP and IP cylinder and the generator, hence the name bridge condenser.

In view of the size and increased volume of pipework compared to earlier designs, special attention was paid to mounting the valve chests as close to the machine as possible to reduce the stored energy effect of overspeed.

The shaft end which connects to the turbine is deferentially tempered to give additional strength to withstand the severe forces which could be applied under fault conditions on the generator.

This is basically a sudden enlargement in the pipe, which causes the water velocity to decrease and so enables any bubbles of gas to be collected in a small chamber fitted with a float-operated alarm switch.

The exciter output is rectified by a 3-phase bridge-connected group of silicon diodes which are natural air cooled and accommodated in a bank of nine cubicles located on a platform cantilevered from the side of the foundation block.

The AVR is a continuously acting regulator including such features as VAR limiting, automatic follow-up of manual control, and protection against over fluxing or over exciting of the main generator.

[43] Coal arriving at the station is discharged from the permanently coupled 29-tonne capacity hopper wagons, the bottoms of which are opened by automatic lineside gear while the train moves through at 0.8 km/h.

[45] During the stations' early life in the 1970s and under the merry-go-round train agreement with British Rail and the National Coal Board, no deliveries were made at the weekends.

The load is automatically taken over by the gas turbines and the auxiliary plant is isolated from the grid supply, provided the system frequency has by then fallen to approximately 48 cycles per second.

The alternators, made by English Electric are rated at 11 kV, 21.9 MVA, 0.8 lagging power factor and have a frequency range of 40 to 51 cycles per second.

The 400 kV substation interconnects four generator circuits, six feeders, two inter-bus transformers and includes two bus coupler switches and one main busbar section.

[58] The design of the prototype indoor 400 kV switch house was arrived at by close liaison between electrical and civil engineers before full details of plant and equipment were known.

Access within the switch house was made easier by a decision to lay 228-millimetre-diameter (9 in) ducts to take many of the cables beneath the surface, thus eliminating numerous trenches.

The diverter switch assembly, together with the transition resistors and operating mechanism is mounted on top of the 132 kV bushing which forms an integral part of the tap changer.

The current line entries for the 132 kV switch house are North Greetwell – Lincoln 1, Retford – Worksop – Checkerhouse 2, North Greetwell – Lincoln 2 and Retford – Worksop – Checkerhouse 1 In 1996 the first unit was equipped with the Advanced Plant Management System (APMS), a system developed by RWE npower and Thales, and implemented by Capula.

FLS Miljo installed the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries wet limestone systems, while Arup Energy and Mowlem took up a design–build partnership to undertake the civil works and construction of infrastructure.