Macron humiliated as broken flagship nuclear reactors to take YEARS to fix

UK 'hasn't invested enough' in domestic energy says Johnson

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On Tuesday, French nuclear regulator ASN warned Mr Macron some problems in the country’s nuclear reactors, like corrosion problems, could take several years to fix. The regulator also warned that repairing the reactors, run by French state owned EDF, would require a “large scale” plan, as more reactors are at risk to be halted.

In a French parliamentary hearing, Bernard Doroszczuk noted that while the French energy firm had investigated 35 weldings for corrosion, and would check a further 105 by the end of June, the EDF is still unsure about what the cause of the problem is.

Corrosion problems in the reactors have been gaining speed, however, he believed that at this stage, it is unlikely that the age of reactors have caused this damage.

He added that EDF’s 32 900MW reactors, which constitute a bulk of France’s reactors, were largely unaffected by the problems from the corrosion.

Authorities believe that one possible cause for the problems could be the “frenchifying of the design” of 900 MW reactors originally based on a Westinghouse design.

According to EDF’s timetable, repair work on the weldings at the Flamanville EPR plant in France will continue until August 2022.

The energy firm has been hit with long delays and budget runs on new nuclear plants, both in France and abroad.

The company’s next-generation EPR reactors have been mired by such issues, as EPR projects at Flamanville and Hinkley Point in the UK have been running years behind schedule, costing billions of pounds over the budget.

Meanwhile, EDF’s EPR reactors in China and Finland have also been hit with technical issues.

This is a humiliating blow for Mr Macron, who was looking to extend the operational lifetimes of France’s 32 oldest existing reactors by 10 years to half a century — thereby avoiding having to shut them down this decade.

The majority of the country’s nuclear plants were built in the late seventies and early eighties, in the wake of the Seventies oil crisis.

EDF has previously reported that, with 27 reactors presently out of commission, the firm is being forced to purchase electricity from the European grid to meet demand — which, thanks to the present gas crisis, is at a premium.

A spokesperson for EDF told Sky News that the corrosion identified in five of the offline reactors “does not call into question the high level of safety of our facilities.”

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“We propose to implement the principle of safety primacy on the technical subject of stress corrosion, which we are currently encountering.”

France is heavily reliant on nuclear energy, accounting for around 70 percent of France’s domestic electricity generation.

Early this month, the Government announced ambitious plans to construct eight new reactors which together will generate some 24 GWe — around a quarter of the UK’s projected energy demand — by the year 2050.

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