Twelve years late, the first coupling of the Flamanville EPR (Manche) is finally scheduled for this Friday, December 20. Between “10 and 15 shutdowns and restarts” of the new reactor are planned in the next six months, during the ramp-up phase, EDF said. The reactor will reach 100% power “in the summer of 2025”, during its first eighteen-month industrial activity cycle, said this Friday, December 20, the deputy director of the nuclear division at EDF, Régis Clément. , during an online press briefing.
In a message addressed to the wholesale energy market, EDF reported on Thursday evening that planned maintenance of the reactor would take place until 8:00 p.m. on Friday, implying coupling at best at the end of the day. During the night, the unavailability of the reactor was extended until 11:00 p.m., according to the electricity supplier’s website.
60,000 technical criteria tested
The first coupling of the reactor to the network, during the night from Friday to Saturday, will take place while it is still at very low load, having reached a level of “around 20%” of its power, he said. specified. This will make it possible to check that “everything is fine” before carrying out “additional tests”. The operation of the reactor “will be marked by different power levels, until the summer of 2025, which will conclude the testing phase”, according to EDF.
The operation consists of coupling “the nuclear part of the installation, that is to say the boiler, to the non-nuclear part, that is to say the turbine which drives the alternator” which allows the delivery electricity, detailed Régis Clément. During the test phase that will follow, some 200 procedures and 60,000 technical and operational criteria will be tested, he said, ensuring that all commissioning of new reactors went through these same mandatory stages.
A cost four times higher than the initial quote
It is therefore not quite the end, but at the very least an outcome for this project which is twelve years behind the initial schedule due to numerous technical setbacks. These caused the deadlines and the bill to explode, now estimated at 13.2 billion euros by EDF, or four times the initial estimate of 3.3 billion. In 2020, the Court of Auditors estimated it at 19 billion including “additional financing costs”.
Paradoxically, the arrival on the network of this 1,600 MW reactor capable of supplying around two million homes, the most powerful in the French fleet, comes at a time when the country’s electricity consumption is down compared to the years of before Covid-19, around 6%.
“Electricity is available, let’s use it,” said EDF CEO Luc Rémont last week, against a backdrop of crisis in the industry, particularly in the automobile industry, and a halt to the electrification of uses.