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Flamanville EPR: ASN gives the green light to postpone the replacement of the defective cover

The French nuclear safety authority (ASN) has accepted the postponement of the replacement of the defective cover of the Flamanville EPR reactor vessel until 2025. This deferral is due to manufacturing anomalies in the cover and will require a global maintenance visit during 2025.

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The nuclear safety authority (ASN) has accepted that EDF postpone to 2025 the replacement of the defective cover of the Flamanville EPR reactor, which is supposed to enter into service in the first quarter of 2024, after a 12-year delay, the nuclear safety watchdog said Friday.

The ASN explained that “the replacement of the reactor vessel cover before the commissioning of the reactor would lead to a postponement of about one year”. Until now, the safety authority had set December 31, 2024 as the deadline for replacing the cover, which would have forced EDF to shut down its EPR only a few months after its start-up, scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

In a decision of 16 May published on its website, the ASN has agreed to wait for the first full operating cycle of the EPR, i.e. between “15 and 18 months” before changing the part, as requested by the nuclear manufacturer Framatome. The replacement of the tank cover, which has “manufacturing anomalies”, will have to be done in conjunction with a first global maintenance visit planned for 2025. It will last between 4 and 9 months according to the operator EDF.

“The manufacture of the replacement cover is underway at Framatome” for a delivery “scheduled for the end of summer 2024,” the ASN said. This is a crucial part, since it covers the tank that contains the nuclear fuel. The deadline to replace the cover had been stopped by the ASN in 2018, but at the time, the reactor was scheduled to start up in the fall of 2019. In the meantime, the timetable has slipped: “hazards that have occurred since then have led to the commissioning of the reactor being envisaged during the first quarter of 2024”, the ASN recalls.

The ASN specifies that “in the event of a further significant delay in the project, the operator will have to re-examine the possibility of replacing the cover before the reactor is commissioned. After a new delay of 6 months announced in December, the start-up of this reactor, the first of this generation planned on French soil, will take place 12 years after the initial planning. These delays have led to an explosion in the cost of the project, which was launched in 2007 and now stands at 13.2 billion euros, according to EDF, four times the initial budget of 3.3 billion euros.

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