The 26 French nuclear reactors currently shut down should have restarted their electricity production during the winter, announced Wednesday the management of EDF, under pressure as a tense season approaches on the energy security front.
France is facing an exceptional unavailability of its 56 reactors: the “effective” holding of this schedule of return to the network will play a key role in the management of electricity this winter, warned Wednesday RTE, the network manager.
This situation is due to the delay of the ten-yearly maintenance due to Covid and the discovery of corrosion problems last winter, forcing EDF to undertake a general inspection.
Wednesday before the MPs, EDF CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy said that “the sites related to corrosion were progressing at a good pace: Tricastin 1, the first, is completed.
Regarding the restart of the 26 reactors currently shut down, five should restart in September, five in October, followed by seven more in November, three in December, three in January and two in February, said Cedric Lewandowski, Executive Director of EDF.
A 26th one is currently in “accidental” shutdown and should be restarted shortly. “To date, 27 reactors are connected to the grid and three are in fuel economy so that they can produce next winter,” according to Lévy.
However, he stressed the “lack of room for maneuver in the sector to absorb (more quickly) this unexpected increase in workload”, especially in the most advanced operations.
“Our teams and those of our industrial partners are fully mobilized to put back on the network the maximum number of reactors possible for the next winter,” he said, adding that the group now had “a means of non-destructive testing” to continue corrosion diagnostics.
But “we are facing an unexpected accumulation of activities, which mobilizes specialized and rare skills, pipe fitters, welders, tapers, boilermakers … This skills gap affects our ability to repair at the rate we would like,” he said.
The boss of EDF, whose successor will be announced shortly, took the opportunity to return to his recent comments critical of the State’s strategy on nuclear power, comments deemed “unacceptable” by Emmanuel Macron.
Wednesday he insisted on the impact of Fukushima and on “the political context of 2012″, then favorable to a nuclear exit. Today “the positive momentum (in favor of nuclear, Editor’s note) is reignited, with the speech of Belfort in particular, but it will take time, it is the industrial time,” he said.
“If, ten years ago, we had been able to launch two or three reactor projects, we could have had them,” he says. After having planned to reduce the nuclear power, a decision made in a 2015 law, France has chosen to revive the atom, through the voice of Emmanuel Macron, who in Belfort in February wanted the construction of six new EPR-type reactors.
