Why two European nuclear reactors will be 7 years late and triple the cost of the same Chinese reactors

From NextBigFuture.com

The original contract between TVO and Areva-Siemens signed in 2003 envisioned the 1700 EPR nuclear plant would cost € 3.2 billion, with a completion date of 2009.

This would have been about $4.3 billion which is a bit more than the $3.8 billion cost of each of the two EPR reactors in China. The chinese EPR reactors appear to be completing on time and budget. They are identical european nuclear reactor designs. Most of the construction is using large modules and heavy equipment. There is not that much labour involved.

TVO announced in December 2011 that it anticipated the 1600 MWe plant to begin commercial operation in August 2014, some five years later than originally planned. By that same year, the anticipated costs of the plant had ballooned to €8.5 billion, according to data released by Areva. In July 2012, the company declared that the plant unit “will not be ready for regular electricity production in 2014.

The instrumentation and control (I and C) architecture of the Flamanville 3 EPR were only declared satisfactory by the ASN regulator in April 2012 and enable it to lift the reservations it expressed in October 2009.

In 2009, Areva has blamed the Finnish utility company, Teollisuuden Voima, which ordered the reactor, for the delays (up to that point). But the Finnish safety authority has said that Areva outsourced a number of aspects of the construction to unqualified subcontractors, making it responsible for a number of the problems.

The plants were about 80% complete in 2009, when the instrumentation and control (the electronic nervous system) had to be reworked.

The most recent delays appear to be the need to fix issues from the stress testing of the design.

Read more »

See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at NextBigFuture.com