France’s first nuclear plant for a quarter century is finally going ahead at Flamanville on the coast of Normandy, 12 years late and six times over budget.
EDF has loaded the fuel of the giant European Pressurised Reactor or EPR1. The first nuclear reaction will take place within weeks, reaching full power of 1.65 gigawatts (GW) by year’s end.
It will be the most powerful reactor on the planet, to be joined eventually by two sister reactors at Hinkley Point, and another at Sizewell C if anybody can find the money.
To fans, Flamanville is an ultra-safe feat of advanced engineering, with three layers of protective barriers. It can withstand an earthquake, a tsunami, a head-on crash by an Airbus A380, or even (arguably) a meltdown of the core. It is built to last 60 years, perhaps a century.
To critics, it is a ruinous misadventure, the ultimate over-refinement of obsolete fission technology that can never compete on a commercial basis. Delays have left France dependent on old reactors that are literally falling apart. EDF has racked up debts of €54bn (£46bn) and had to be renationalised in 2022.
To those of us in the middle – friendly to nuclear, if cheap enough – it is striking that Korea seems able to roll out workhorse reactors relatively quickly at half the cost. Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power’s modified APR1000 reactor was certified in Europe last year.
Flamanville 3 began in 2007 with an expected cost of €3.3bn. France’s supreme audit institution, the Cour des Comptes, says the final tally is €19.1bn, calling it an “operational failure”, undertaken prematurely and with hubris.
“It has been an industrial catastrophe. I never thought they would even forget how to make a concrete slab,” said Bernard Laponche, a French nuclear veteran and doyen of the dissidents.
All is forgiven, apparently, even though a parallel EPR1 plant at Olkiluoto in Finland – opened last year – had similar delays and cost overruns, and even though the Taishan I variant in China had to shut down for a year due to damaged fuel rods.
Emmanuel Macron began his presidency by closing a working reactor near the German border in order to please Angela Merkel. He had a Damascene conversion after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mr Macron now wants to build 14 modified EPR2 reactors – supposedly cheaper – in a repeat of France’s “dash for nuclear” under premier Pierre Messmer in 1974.
It is a heroic undertaking for a country with a structural budget deficit of 5pc of GDP and a debt ratio stuck at 112pc, with rating agencies on the prowl. Much the same can be said about Britain’s nuclear renaissance, targeting 24 GW by mid-century.
The bet is that the average cost per EPR will fall by 30pc as the series rolls out a scale. That would cut the putative bill for Sizewell C to £85 MWh in today’s money, or lower if you treat it as a 60-year venture in accounting terms. Reste à voir, as the French say.
Valerie Faudon, head of the French Association of Nuclear Energy, said Flamanville went wrong because France had lost its industrial skills from long neglect.
“We got hit twice: we no longer had the know-how to build new reactors; and we were working on an entirely new model. Flamanville has been an investment to relearn how to do it,” she said.
The catalogue of errors began from the start. Stray rocks from dynamite blasting rained on the Flamanville 2 reactor nearby. Regulators discovered that the concrete pillars were “pockmarked with holes like a Swiss cheese”.
The steel reactor vessel had unsafe levels of carbon content. A Japanese company was brought in to build a new one. The saga went on and on.
No doubt lessons have been learned, but Hinkley Point also faces spiralling costs and long delays a decade later. Third time lucky, perhaps?
Mr Laponche says the Messmer episode of the 1970s was a panic reaction to the first Opec crisis, a time when France had oil-based power plants. It led to fevered calls for energy sovereignty.
Messmer launched six reactors a year with theatrical gusto, egged on by vested interests. “There was a mafia aspect of cronyism in this, as always,” he said.
The numbers were justified by a make-believe extrapolation of power demand, assumed to be doubling every 10 years. “It was ridiculous, but they got everybody to swallow it,” he said.
The demand did not exist. France ended up selling excess electricity to Germany at give away prices.
“They knew we couldn’t sell it anywhere else: they got cheap power and we got the safety risk and the radioactive waste. We never recouped our investment costs,” he said.
“Macron’s speeches today are almost a carbon copy of Messmer’s speeches 50 years ago. It is all about energy security again, with climate change on top, and people just go along with it. The parallel is uncanny,” he said.
Mr Laponche said the early reactors were built to last 30 years. They were extended to 40. The new EPRs were supposed to arrive in time to take the baton, but Flamanville drastically upset this calculation. In the meantime, France had missed the boat on renewables.
In the years since work began on Flamanville, the EU has installed 476 GW of solar and wind, roughly equal to 74 EPR reactors once you adjust for apples and oranges.
France has had to keep its old reactors going ever longer beyond their safe industrial life. The crunch hit in 2022 when half the national fleet of 56 reactors was out of action, some due to drought but mostly due to corrosion or fractures. This collided with Putin’s war. EDF had to import power at exorbitant spot prices to cover the shortfall.
The question that French and British governments must answer as they commit to colossal projects that will not come on stream until the late 2030s or 2040s, and will then bind us for 60 years, is what happens if commercial nuclear fusion comes good over the next decade, as most fusion insiders now think probable.
Fusion has minimal radioactive waste. It is so safe that plants can be built anywhere like a hospital. Compare that with fission. German authorities began cleaning up the giant Greifswald nuclear plant in 1995. They are still cleaning it up. The decommissioning cost has reached €6.6bn.
There is much to be said in favour of visionary industrial plans. They create a motivating sense of national purpose. They generate spin-off technology. They are certainly better than hand-wringing defeatism on everything. But cost matters and technology is changing the energy equation very rapidly.
Let us hope that this Anglo-French bet on the biggest reactors of all time is not another Concorde.
