Maud Descamps, edited by Solène Leroux
, modified at
1:50 p.m., January 14, 2022
This is very bad news for EDF. According to our information, the four largest reactors in the French nuclear power plant at Chooz in the Ardennes and Civaux in Vienne – shut down in mid-December because of a fault detected in the cooling circuit of emergency – cannot be restarted before the fall, or even before the end of the year. EDF announced that their shutdown would be extended without specifying the timetable.
Need new parts
The four reactors, which produce around 10% of nuclear electricity in France, have a corrosion problem that requires repairs and new parts. It will therefore be necessary to wait until the end of the year, according to information from Europe 1, until these new parts are manufactured so that the reactors can be put back into operation.
This prolonged shutdown is expected to cost EDF several billion euros. In addition, this corrosion problem also affects the Penly power station in Seine-Maritime
and might also concern other French nuclear power plants.
Little electricity to get through the winter
News that comes at the worst time for EDF who announced Wednesday morning a new delay on the Flamanville EPR site
, and when the availability of its reactors is at an all-time low. Ten reactors out of the 56 in the park are shut down. Either for maintenance problems or for unforeseen technical problems.
the electricity network manager RTE has alerted
at the beginning of January on the risk of not having enough electricity to get through the winter. The Minister of Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili, took the decision a few days ago toincrease the amount of electricity produced by coal-fired power plants
to compensate for the lack of nuclear electricity.
A risk of electricity shortage?
Invited on Europe Midi on Friday, Nicolas Goldberg, energy expert at Colombus consulting, considered that this finding is rather worrying. “We knew that there were going to be certain nuclear reactors shut down to pass the ten-yearly outages which allow the nuclear fleet to be extended up to 50 years or even more, and that it was going to be complicated to get through the winter. has this corrosion problem, “he asked. According to him, these problems are not necessarily linked to an aging nuclear fleet. Indeed, the reactors concerned are “the most powerful and the most recent”.
Regarding the risks of electricity shortage, Nicolas Goldberg said on our antenna that “they are very limited in time”. “We have an additional consumption band in winter in France, due to the fact that we heat ourselves a lot with electricity. So there, until the end of February-beginning of March, there is a risk. RTE is updating its study every month. day to see how risky it is and how likely they are to use what are called followingmarket levers, ”he explained.
“For now, as long as we have good weather – it all depends on the temperature – and a little wind – because we have a lot of wind power on the network – there is little risk”, finally asserted the ‘expert. “This is why RTE was rather reassuring for January. But we will meet once more next winter. A priori, these tensions on the network are expected to last two or three winters.”
