With its large grey facade overlooking the East Suffolk coastline, the Sizewell A nuclear power station has been a landmark in the county since it was built in the 1960s.
However, that familiar vista will soon be about to change as nuclear decommissioning firm Magnox is preparing the site's turbine hall for demolition, beginning in the summer of 2024.
READ MORE: Sizewell A: Turbine Hall set to be bulldozed this summer
And the EADT was given a rare opportunity to look inside the turbine hall to see how work has been progressing since the four boiler reactor stopped operating in 2006.
During Tuesday's visit, we were able to see inside both the turbine hall and the reactor building and appreciate the enormity of the operation during the 40 years in which the site was producing some 110 terawatt hours of electricity.
Of course, safety and security is paramount at all times and prior to beginning the tour, we were given a briefing about potential hazards on our way round.
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We were fully kitted out with a hard hat, boots, gloves and hi-vis vest and were issued with a special device that monitors radiation levels.
Reassuringly, approximately 99% of the most radioactive materials have now been removed from the site, meaning the levels of radiation we were exposed to would have been less than those experienced by an airline pilot.
Staff at the site who led the tour described how the sound of the turbines and other equipment would have been deafening when working, but on the day of our visit, the hall was eerily quiet.
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Jacob Clutterbuck, site delivery manager for Magnox and Wendy Heath, the firm's project manager, described how workers were currently clearing the hall of asbestos to be ready for the 'deplanting' stage when machinery is removed before demolition.
Although the two giant turbines inside the hall are now rusted hulks in comparison to their former working selves, any visitor would still be able to appreciate the scale of the operation, with large aisles and staircases leading to different levels.
In the middle, the white control room still stands, with hundreds of gauges that would have been monitored by staff to ensure that all the systems were working effectively.
The next stop was the waste facility where we saw how low-level waste was carefully and safely stored in drums ready for disposal.
Waste manager Gareth Ward said the materials that qualified as low-level waste could include PPE, hand tools and plastic packaging, which would be taken to a low-level waste repository in Cumbria.
Upon reaching the reactor building, we were issued with the radiation monitor, which was kept fastened to us on a special belt.
A short lift ride later, we were standing over the reactor core and were able to see where the fuel rods were inserted by machine.
Once the fuel had been spent, the rods were then removed and taken to a cooling pond at the site.
However, the plant has long since been de-fuelled and the cooling ponds cleaned, with the waste sent to another Magnox nuclear facility at Sellafield in Cumbria.
But during its working days, steam generated by the reactor was used to drive the two large turbines in the Turbine Hall, with the steam then cooled back to water by passing seawater through condensing units located beneath the steam turbines.
Site director Sohail Ashraf said after the tour that the next stage would be for Sizewell A to enter the Care and Maintenance phase where the site is kept in a safe and secure state to allow radioactivity levels to drop.
Final site clearance- when the reactor building will be removed- is due to take place in the 2090s, but could happen sooner.
He said alternative uses were being considered for the site, including possibly as a training facility for the nuclear industry, but this was only an idea at present.
"We are proud of how we are doing our decommissioning here and we want to do that safely. We have got our local communities at heart and we want to engage with our communities," Mr Ashraf added.
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