The Flamanville nuclear reactor is once again in the crosshairs of the regulatory authorities. A permanent shutdown could prove fatal for the entire supply chain.
EDF and Areva, the two French companies managing the enormous construction site at Flamanville, in Normandy, where a new nuclear reactor has been under construction for years, will have to carry out further tests before they can proceed with the work. This was explained by the two companies themselves, which stressed that the problems once again concern anomalies detected in the "vessel" that will house the reactor.
This is, therefore, the same component that had already forced a halt in spring 2015. At the time, the French Nuclear Safety Authority (Asn) had raised the issue, and its president, Pierre-Franck Chevet, in a hearing before the Paris Senate had stated bluntly: "The problem identified is serious. Very serious. It involves one of the main components of the structure." The component was transported to the construction site last February, in a convoy symbolically blocked overnight by Greenpeace.
The vessel is in fact a component designed to contain the reactor core: it is therefore a fundamental barrier which, in the event of an accident, is intended to protect the environment from radioactivity. This is why the authorities are requiring new tests. These, however, according to EDF and Areva, should not cause a delay relative to the scheduled date for the reactor entering service (namely the end of 2018).
Yet Chevet himself, in an interview with the daily Le Figaro, stated that assessing the new resistance tests will take months: a response will not come before early 2017. And the question being asked in France is: what will happen if the component is ultimately declared non-compliant with safety standards? According to the same French newspaper, "for the two companies it would be a genuine industrial catastrophe. They would in fact be forced to redo a large part of the work from scratch."
This would translate into "more years of work", as well as "a further explosion in costs, which have already tripled compared with initial forecasts, bringing the total price of the project to over 10 billion euros". All this in a context in which EDF has been described, in a letter addressed by trade unions to French president François Hollande, as being "on the brink of bankruptcy". And after Areva, in the midst of a financial crisis, was acquired by EDF itself in an emergency operation.
A potential "no" from the Nuclear Safety Authority, finally, even beyond the economic questions, would amount to a severe blow to the image of next-generation reactors and, consequently, to the entire nuclear industry supply chain.
