The management of French company Edf has revised upwards the costs of the new Epr reactor under construction on the English Channel: €10.5 billion.
Jean-Bernard Lévy, chief executive of Edf, the French company that operates the Flamanville nuclear power plant in Normandy, has announced yet another delay to the commissioning of the new "Epr", which has been under construction since 2007. The first French third-generation reactor, supplied by Areva, will not be ready before the end of 2018. And the cost, initially forecast at €3 billion, will reach the stratospheric figure of €10.5 billion: the price of an economic budget package.
The latest delay was certainly compounded by the problem identified on 7 April by the French Nuclear Safety Authority (Asn), which found certain "anomalies" described by the president of the same watchdog body as "very serious". But cost overruns and difficulties are being recorded virtually everywhere with the new French-made reactors: a situation that has helped to sink the Areva group, for which the government was forced to order, at the end of July, an emergency rescue (carried out by Edf itself).
Yet Paris appears determined to press ahead. For that matter, Lévy himself, according to the newspaper Le Monde, has described the project as "vital". Flamanville is, in this sense, more than a building site: it is a "flagship" with which the aim is to demonstrate that Edf, and with it France, are still capable of completing major projects: "The whole world is watching what is happening in Normandy," the group's chief admitted, a few months ago, in an interview given to the radio station Europe 1.
Despite the hopes of French nuclear advocates, however, the commercial data now speak plainly. More than twenty years have passed since the launch of the Epr reactor construction programme. Since then, Areva has sold only four: in addition to the one at Flamanville, one to Finland and two to China. While another four are in play in Great Britain (two at Hinkley Point and two at Sizewell).
According to the new head of Areva's nuclear division, Bernard Fontana, the made-in-France reactor is "an excellent reactor", which simply needs to be "given a chance". According to Le Monde's analysis, however, the future of Epr technology "is now an unknown quantity".