The opening of the European Pressurized Reactor in Flamanville comes 12 years late on the initial schedule.

Summary

France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.

The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.

President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.

Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”

  • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    had money not been saved

    This just serves as a lesson to the “failsafe technology” crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.

    Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, “If the Japanese can’t do it we can’t do it either” but if she had been paying attention, it should’ve been clear that we couldn’t do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted… figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.

    Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don’t want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.