nuclear-news

Cracking Under Pressure: Inside the Race to Fix France’s Nuclear Plants

“The plan to fix seven safety cooling systems in 2023 is “not the end of the story,”… “It’s possible that we have to carry long and complex works. I think that 2023, ’24 and ’25 will continue to entail issues related to the stress corrosion.”

Yahoo News, Francois De Beaupuy, Sat, January 28, With assistance from Samuel Dodge and Patricia Suzara.

(Bloomberg) — Behind layers of security and a thick concrete wall, a team of welders work in shifts to fix the crippled Penly nuclear plant in northern France. Sweating under protective gear, they’re replacing cracked pipes in the emergency cooling system which protects against a reactor meltdown.

Each weld takes at least three days to complete, with workers often on their knees or backs to reach for the correct angle. Even in radiation suits, health regulations limit work in that environment to a maximum 40 hours a year.

The complicated procedures, replicated across sites this winter, have hampered the ability of Electricite de France SA to get its reactors back online after lengthy shutdowns.

Deadlines have slipped. The two Penly reactors were scheduled to be back online this month and next. Instead, EDF has been forced to delay the restarts to May and June.

“These are complex situations, in a noisy and radioactive environment,” Laurent Marquis, a manager at Altrad Group-Endel which is coordinating the repairs for EDF at Penly, said last month, before the restarts were pushed back. “Workers can sometimes only hold their position for just a few minutes before they need to be replaced.”

The power station, below a cliff on France’s northern coast, normally provides electricity for about 3.6 million households. Its two reactors have been, in effect, grounded by faulty plumbing — the same cracked pipes first discovered by EDF at another plant in late 2021. That reactor, at Civaux in central France, only came back online on Wednesday after extensive repairs.

The discoveries plunged the operator into a crisis with repercussions for all of Europe. EDF called it an “annus horribilis,” and from early May to late October, about half of its 56 reactors sat idle due to the repair and maintenance backlog.

It flipped France from Europe’s biggest electricity exporter into a net importer last year, just as the continent needed it more than ever. After gas imports from Russia dried up, energy prices soared, governments spent billions helping consumers with their bills and Europe was threatened with shortages and blackouts.

So far, Europe has avoided the worst-case scenario, thanks to efforts to conserve energy and a relatively mild winter that reduced heating demand

But the crisis is far from over, and EDF needs to find a way to avoid a repeat next winter. That challenge — finding problems, fixing them, doing checks — is already a mammoth task, and it’s being compounded by financial issues and staff shortages………………………………………………………….

By May, the utility had concluded that 16 of its reactors had pipes more prone to stress corrosion. Significantly, they were actually the group’s newest reactors, where the French nuclear plant builder Framatome — a unit of EDF — had modified the original Westinghouse Electric Co. design used for the 40 older units………………………………….

EDF has a history of missed maintenance deadlines, which an external audit published in June blamed on inadequate management of data, staff shortfalls and inexperienced teams in charge of turnarounds.

The company is still trying to figure out the speed at which cracks progress through pipes once they appear, meaning it faces tighter, more frequent monitoring of its reactors. Future setbacks can’t be ruled out.

The plan to fix seven safety cooling systems in 2023 is “not the end of the story,” Cedric Lewandowski, EDF’s senior executive vice-president for nuclear and thermal production, said at a parliamentary hearing this month. “It’s possible that we have to carry long and complex works. I think that 2023, ’24 and ’25 will continue to entail issues related to the stress corrosion.”

If that caps nuclear output, that means less power for France, and less to export to Europe.

Compounding the pipe issues is the broader maintenance work needed on what’s an aging fleet. Most of EDF’s reactors were built from the late 70s to the mid-90s, and now require longer down time. The utility wants to coincide the corrosion repairs with the other halts to maintain production, Lewandowski said.

On top of that, the utility is still repairing 122 faulty welds at a new flagship reactor in Flamanville in Normandy, which it wants to commission in the first half of 2024. The project is already over a decade behind schedule, and about €10 billion over budget.

All of which raises significant questions for EDF and the French government……………..

Macron’s government wants to help EDF build six new large reactors and begin preparatory studies on another eight units by 2050.

But building 14 new reactors is “absolutely not within EDF’s reach with its current balance sheet,” said Celine Cherubin, a senior credit officer at Moody’s Investors Service………………………..

The bigger question is whether EDF and the government can now reverse the sense of decline in France’s nuclear industry.

January 29, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, safety