Flamanville reactor overshadowing prospects for Hinkley Point C – Power Engineering International
Continuing difficulties with EDF’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) technology at a flagship plant in northern France are leading to doubts about the viability of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant across the English Channel in the UK.
More faults were highlighted in a leaked report on the Flamanville facility from the French nuclear safety regulator, adding to a warning in April about the reliability of the EPR’s reactor vessel.
Flamanville
Flamanville is already five years behind schedule and the UK’s Treasury is, according to the FT, worried about the technology’s capability for Hinkley Point C.
“I think there are serious questions about the technology,” one unnamed Treasury figure told the FT. “Only if that can be fixed is there a desire to go ahead with it . . . on balance.”
Full story from PEI.
The UK needs to decide whether we have an energy system that actually works, or whether we try to fight global warming.
It is increasingly we cannot do both.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Cancel while we can on grounds of technical and timing issues.
Get in a decent company to supply one.
This dinosaur of a design, the EPR, at Hinkley and then Sizewell, should definitely be cancelled. The ONR’s GDA of the AP1000 and ABWR designs nears completion and these modern, safer designs should soon be licensed for construction in the UK. A fleet of AP1000s and ABWRs would do most of the baseload job and a few modern coal-fired power stations and gas-fired power stations for load follow and is then all we need.
I should have added, see http://www.onr.org.uk/new-reactors/quarterly-updates.htm
We mustn’t also forget the other EPR being constructed at Olkiluoto in Finland.
“Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 will start operations in 2018, 13 years after work began on the first-of-a-kind EPR, the Areva-Siemens consortium building the plant has informed client Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO).”
“Since construction began in 2005, the Olkiluoto 3 project has suffered various delays which have seen its projected startup date put back several times from the original 2009 target. Areva’s most recent estimate of its losses at completion of the turnkey project stand at €3.9 billion ($5.1 billion), but the company says it does not expect the updated schedule to have an impact on that amount.”
Not all the problems are due to the design, the Finns changing the design of the protection system part way through construction and I recall one contractor used the wrong type of concrete.
See http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/nn-olkiluoto-3-start-up-pushed-back-to-2018-0109147.html
Costly delays … application for a new reactor was based on economic criteria