Under construction since 2017, the Flamanville EPR is accumulating disappointments. In a press release on Wednesday, EDF warned of further delays for the new generation EPR nuclear reactor under construction in the Channel. The reactor fuel loading date, i.e. when it was started, is “postponed from the end of 2022 to the second quarter of 2023”, announced the group.
Originally scheduled for 2012, its entry into service has already been postponed several times, in particular due to manufacturing defects. This time, the public company explains that this umpteenth delay is due to “industrial context made more difficult by the pandemic”.
At the same time, EDF is once again revising the cost of the project upwards, from 12.4 billion euros to 12.7 billion euros, against 3 billion euros at the start of its estimate, in 2004. Tuesday, the Minister for the Ecological Transition Barbara Pompili, guest on BFM, recognized that the EPR started up in 2022 “seemed difficult”. “We will have to draw the experience feedback from this EPR”, she added.
The announcement comes as France prepares to launch a new nuclear reactor construction program, as announced by President Emmanuel Macron on November 9.
The Flamanville EPR is currently the only one built in France. Three EPR reactors have already started operating around the world: two in China and one in Finland. In July, an incident led to the shutdown of one of these EPR reactors in Taishan. EDF explains Wednesday that he suffered “a phenomenon of mechanical wear of certain assembly components” and that this “does not call into question the EPR model”.