When it is connected to the French electricity network – by the summer, if everything goes as planned this time – reactor number 3 of the Flamanville nuclear power plant (Manche) will become the fourth EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) in operation around the world. Thirty-five years after the birth of the “EPR project”, in 1989, as part of Franco-German cooperation, and almost twenty years after the launch of a first project in Finland in 2005, these models of reactors European pressurized water can still be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The two EPRs at the Taishan power plant, located in Guangdong province, China, were the first to be commissioned, in 2018 and 2019, five years late. Built by EDF and the Chinese CGN, they required nine years of work. The Olkiluoto EPR, built by the Areva-Siemens consortium on an island in southwest Finland, has been operational since 2022: the project, planned to last four years, will ultimately have dragged on for more than sixteen years, and the Costs have skyrocketed, going from 3 billion to 11 billion euros. The drift is of the same order in Flamanville, where the duration of the project has been multiplied by four and the costs by five.
Today, only two other EPRs are under construction. The Hinkley Point C project, in the southwest of England, started in 2018 and is experiencing similar setbacks. EDF, which is leading the project, is now announcing that reactor number 1 will be commissioned at best in 2029, or even in 2031 – rather than in 2025 as initially planned. “This number of three EPRs in service in the world is low compared to the ambitions of the industrial project, believes Yves Marignac, member of the permanent group of experts on nuclear pressure equipment and spokesperson for the négaWatt association. The idea was for Flamanville to be the showcase for the EPR domestically and globally and for this to trigger orders, but on this point the sector failed. »
If a certain number of countries have expressed their interest in nuclear power, in order to decarbonize their energy system, new firm EPR orders are still awaited. In 2022, the British government gave the green light to the construction of two reactors similar to those of Hinkley Point C on the Sizewell C site, in the east of England, and it announced, in early 2024, that it would have injected an additional 1.5 billion euros into the project, led by EDF. But to see the light of day, this plant must still find new funding. A final investment decision is not expected before the end of the year.
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