A building of the EPR nuclear reactor in Flamanville, Normandy, June 14, 2022 (AFP/Archives/Sameer Al-DOUMY)
The fuel loading of EDF’s Flamanville EPR reactor, a site marked by repeated setbacks, has been postponed until at least mid-April instead of March 31 as initially planned by the electricity group, the Electricity Authority said on Tuesday. nuclear safety (ASN).
“In the coming days, ASN will launch the consultation on the draft commissioning decision, that is to say that we will submit it to public comments for at least 15 days (…) or even 3 weeks, and at the end the ASN will take the commissioning decision,” explained the safety authority to AFP, confirming information from Les Echos.
“Indeed, that pushes us back to mid-April,” added the spokesperson in reference to the commissioning decision, “a prerequisite” for EDF to be able to load the nuclear fuel rods into the reactor.
Given the “incompressible deadlines” for this consultation, fuel loading, a key milestone for the start-up of the reactor, will therefore not be able to take place before “mid-April”, estimated the ASN.
On this date, the deadline for commissioning the installation, set at April 10 in the creation authorization decree, will have expired but this is “without immediate consequence”, and “does not prevent ASN from authorizing commissioning of the reactor”, ASN explained to AFP in mid-March.
Until now, the EDF group had announced fuel loading in the first quarter of 2024, an objective repeated several times.
But the Safety Authority warned in January that the schedule was “tense” due to the final conformity checks to be carried out on certain pressure equipment, such as the vessel, the centerpiece of a nuclear reactor.
These latest exchanges extended the duration of the investigation of the file which was finally completed “last week”, ASN told AFP.
This consultation at the end of which the ASN will issue its commissioning opinion, taking into account or not the comments of the public, is the epilogue of a river construction site, 17 years after the launch of the construction of the Normandy EPR, marked by numerous cost and schedule slippages.
“After loading the reactor with nuclear fuel, start-up operations will continue, including checks of all safety-related systems, tests and qualifications of equipment carried out throughout the rise in temperature and pressure of the reactor. boiler, then during the ramp-up of the reactor. At 25% power, the production unit will be connected to the national electricity network”, detailed EDF in December 2022.
For the moment, the date of “coupling”, that is to say its connection to the network, is maintained at mid-2024, according to the latest regulatory information from EDF published in December 2023.
If the start-up is confirmed in the summer of 2024, it will therefore take place 12 years late on the planned schedule, for a total bill now estimated at 13.2 billion euros, according to EDF, or four times the initial budget of 3 .3 billion euros.
© 2024 AFP
Did you like this article ? Share it with your friends using the buttons below.
