The head of French energy utility EDF used his presentation of the latest financial results last Friday (July 26) to update the company’s nuclear ambitions: a target of 70 months to build a reactor – or half the current construction time.
EDF can take a breath: Its €54 billion debt shrank by €200 million since the end of 2023. Despite this good news, falling electricity prices are leading to fears of lower longer-term revenues. This poses a challenge to EDF’s planned investment programme in six – or even 14 – new nuclear reactors in France between now and 2035-2040.
CEO Luc Rémont announced that these individual reactors will be built in an average of 70 months, or just under six years. Initially, EDF was planning nine years of construction for the first of six reactors, and seven and a half years for the final of the series, as MontelNews pointed out.
Chinese pace
France’s recent construction pace does not comparable favourably to the very high speeds of Chinese constructors of nuclear reactors. The last five Chinese reactors were built in five to seven years, with lighter labour laws, more workers than in Europe, and an established reactor design that has been deployed multiple times already.
From an empirical point of view, everything suggests that a 70-month construction time is ambitious, but the sector reacted positively to Rémont’s target.
“The faster we build, the more competitive we’ll be,” Valérie Faudon, general delegate of the French energy nuclear society, an association that defends nuclear, told Euractiv.
Faudon, Rémont and others in the sector are betting on the “series effect”.
“There are (already) gains from the 2nd unit of the 1st pair of reactors. That’s what we’re seeing at Hinkley Point” she explained, a nuclear power station under construction in England.
Everything to prove
At Hinkley Point, EDF is currently building two of its ‘EPR’ type reactors, which are expected to take 11 to 13 years to build, from the first pouring of concrete to commissioning, or approximately 132 to 156 months. The project will ultimately deliver two 1,600-megawatt (MW) reactors.
Worse still, EDF is bogged down in the construction of a single reactor at Flamanville in Normandy, of the same type and size as those at Hinkley Point. Construction has taken 17 years, 12 years longer than planned, with start-up scheduled to occur before the end of 2024.
Faudon said it was “good that Luc Rémont is setting ambitious targets for the industry”. But everything remains to be proven, and Europe’s largest energy company is more than ever facing a moment of truth.
After losing out in the race to build a reactor in the Czech Republic to South Korean competitor KHNP on 17 July, “a problem of industrial confidence is setting in”, a sector player told Euractiv.
Source: EURACTIV