PARIS (Reuters) – EDF is targeting a capacity for the French nuclear industry to build at least one large reactor per year during the 2030s, its CEO, Luc Rémont, said on Tuesday.
The French public electrician is working in particular on the construction project of six EPR2s in France, two new EPRs in England, at Sizewell, as well as on projects in India, the Czech Republic and Poland.
“We are counting on an accelerated rate of construction capacity for large reactors to go from what we have today, that is to say 1 or 2 per decade, (…) and gradually increase to 1 or even 1.5 per year,” Luc Rémont told journalists at the World Nuclear Exhibition near Paris.
The CEO of EDF specified that this increase in pace would take place gradually, with the objective of achieving it “during the next decade”.
Luc Rémont, who is part of a logic of building reactors in series and “standardization on a larger scale”, after the difficulties encountered in particular on the Flamanville EPR site (Manche), recalled that the Europe was “the first strategic market” of EDF and that the group had “neither the vocation (…), nor the means to be an investor everywhere”.
“There are countries in which we will simply be developers – in part – and suppliers of technologies, or simply suppliers of technologies,” he said.
“We are going to adapt, even in Europe, to these different modes of intervention based firstly on what the partners with whom we work want and then also obviously on our own means.”
Referring to the project to build six EPR reactors in India, at Jaitapur, Luc Rémont also noted “the Indian authorities’ desire to move forward”, without commenting on a possible decision-making timetable.
(Reporting by Benjamin Mallet; editing by Zhifan Liu)
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