In an interview at the “World”, Bernard Doroszczuk, the president of the nuclear safety authority, alert for the lack of margins in terms of electrical supply security.
Gathered by and
First, the president of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), Bernard Doroszczuk, wishes to highlight a reassuring point. Despite the complications due to the sanitary crisis, “the level of nuclear safety and radiation protection has been quite satisfactory in 2021,” he says in the preamble to his interview in the world. In particular the conduct of the fourth ten-year reactors visits. older “. The French Nuclear’s “Constable”, however, warns against “a double unpublished fragility”: for both reactors, but also for the facilities that manufacture, retreat or value fuel.
for 2022, EDF expects to produce nuclear power at a historically low level for at least thirty years. Why?
A number of items were quite predictable: Flamanville’s EPR Reactor [Handle] is not in use; The two reactors of Fessenheim [Haut-Rhin] are closed [since 2020]; And the winter of 2021-2022, even more than the previous one, is marked by the work of the great fairing and the ten-year visits that involve longer stops of certain reactors. The health crisis, and in particular the first confinement, also had a cascading repercussions on the schedule of judgments. She has reduced availability margins in winter.
Since these identified difficulties have been added, since December 2021, a unavailability of four reactors linked to the discovery of an allegedly unexpected allea of corrosion on an important circuit for safety, the safety injection circuit . This anomaly led EDF, in a completely responsible way, to stop four reactors [and another at least in Penly (Seine-Maritime) in January].
This accumulation of events leads to the situation we fear: a tension on the electrical system that could make decisions of safety competing with electrical safety decisions. The ASN has repeatedly expressed the need to maintain margins in the dimensioning of the electrical system and facilities, to face hazards. Now, today, there is no margin!
In this context, it seems possible to stop twelve additional reactors by 2035, as provided for in the Energetic roadmap?
Given the predictable development of electrical uses in the coming
Years, the current voltage situation should lead the government to reallure this choice, except security imperative. This choice should be duly weighed against realistic commissioning forecasts, by 2035, new means of production, whatever they are, to be able to keep margins for safety in the electrical system.
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