The Flamanville EPR will be connected to the network on Friday, according to EDF

Each step taken by the Flamanville EPR is to be marked with a white stone. This one especially. EDF has just announced that this Friday, December 20, the production of “Fla3” would be injected onto the French lines. In other words, the country is preparing to have 57 nuclear reactors capable of sending electricity to the network. Twenty-five years since such an event, called “coupling”, had taken place. Precisely, since the start-up of the Civaux power plant in 1999. With Flamanville 3, the installed power of EDF’s nuclear fleet in France increased from 61.4 gigawatts to 63 gigawatts, consolidating its second position behind the United States (96 .9 GW) and ahead of China (54.3 GW).

The Normandy EPR summarizes the recent history of French nuclear power. If it is today the first reactor in the relaunch of French nuclear power, it almost was the last to be built in France. It is only since 2022 that France has officially decided to reconnect with the atom and rely on this sector to strengthen its energy sovereignty. The 2010s were, on the contrary, marked by French and European disengagement, boosted by the Fukushima disaster (in Japan in 2011). The trajectory therefore seemed set, little by little, the fifty-eight reactors in the French fleet were going to be shut down. The climax was reached with the shutdown of the two reactors at the Fessenheim power station in Alsace in 2020. At the risk of accentuating the country’s dependence on oil and gas, which already represent 60% of its energy consumption, compared to only 40% for electricity. Despite a hostile context and cascading technical difficulties, the project continued, accumulating, it should be remembered, additional costs and delays? The EPR should have started in 2012 – an optimistic date to say the least, with work beginning in 2007 – and cost 3.3 billion euros. The bill ultimately reached 13.2 billion (in 2015 euros and excluding interim interest).

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Serial complications

Until the end the beast will have been complicated to tame. This year again, the difficulties continued to accumulate, reminding us how difficult it is to maintain know-how in such a complex sector, with no future prospects. The first nuclear fusion, divergence, was initially hoped for “during March”. We finally had to wait until the beginning of September. “What emotion and pride to witness the first heartbeat of the EPR live! Since July, the tests and checks preparatory to the divergence have continued; the teams mobilized to carry out all the tests and maintenance activities prior to the divergence operations”Alain Morvan, Flamanville 3 project director, explained on LinkedIn.

Alas, the next day, the reactor shut down automatically, before being restarted. It totals around forty “significant events for its safety”. Nothing surprising “with the loss of experience in commissioning a new reactor. But the number of human errors is worrying. EDF will have to explain itself to the Authority. The number of events and the human factor deserve reflection »Bernard Doroszczuk explained to Le Figaro, on the occasion of the end of his mandate as president of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) on November 13.

This December 20 therefore marks a new stage, which will call for even others. The milestones are clearly set and supervised, in particular by the ASN. “After its coupling, the operation of the reactor will be marked by different power levels, until the summer of 2025, which will conclude the testing phase”specifies EDF. At the end of this test period, the EPR will operate at 100% power until the first scheduled shutdown for maintenance and fuel reloading, called Complete Visit 1 (VC1). It will have produced 14 TWh of electricity. This visit will also be marked by the changing of the tank cover, another complicated operation but one that the EDF teams are considering with great serenity.