French power utility EDF will continue to implement the action plan on welds of the main secondary system of the 1,650 MWe Flamanville-3 EPR reactor (France), as announced in July 2018. The group expects to start the hot tests during the second half of February 2019 and complete the loading of nuclear fuel during the fourth quarter of 2019. So far, the project will be built under target construction costs kept at €10.9bn for EDF at the commissioning date.
In July 2018, the company revised the schedule and the construction costs of the project: the loading of nuclear fuel was delayed by a year, while construction costs rose to €10.9bn, from the €10.5bn expected previously (up from a December 2012 estimate of €8bn). The Flamanville project was initially expected to be commissioned in 2012 at a cost of €3bn; it will now start at least 7 years behind schedule, posting a cost escalation of nearly €8bn. This delay will also postpone the planned closure of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant by one year.
The project is facing other challenges and even though the French nuclear watchdog (ASN) cleared the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) of the unit, it will have to be replaced by 2024 at the latest. Even if the reactor comes onstream in 2019 as planned, a maintenance process will have to be scheduled before this date to replace the RPV once a new one has been produced.
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