EDITORIAL
>> Bruno Mayor, the Minister of Economy, warned EDF Monday: "The nuclear industry must recover." These words are part of an uncompromising report on the excesses of the site of the EPR Flamanville. Our editorialist Nicolas Barré, managing editor of the newspaper Les Echos , analyzes this report on Europe 1.
"This report, submitted by Jean-Martin Folz, the former boss of PSA, has the great merit of drawing a clinical report of the excesses of this project and this failure that is in a few staggering numbers. Flamanville, launched in 2006 by EDF, was to be a 4-year project costing 3.3 billion euros, but today the bill is 12 billion and this reactor will not be put into service before the end of 2022. How did we get there? "Jean-Martin Folz points out the responsibilities of the EDF teams:" a bad organization "," poorly managed supplier relationships and difficult with Areva "and to top it all off" a widespread loss of skills of the industry that had not built a reactor for 16 years ".
Is EPR technology condemned?
No, that's the other key point of the report. Two EPRs are in service in China and this is the proof, says Jean-Martin Folz, the relevance of the concept and design of the EPR. French engineers are quite capable of doing the same thing and EDF can recover from its mistakes. The subject now is political. France must in principle decide before the end of the five-year period whether or not it is building new EPRs to replace the old plants. Obviously, the delay of Flamanville complicates the situation, difficult to launch new projects as long as this reactor does not work. The future of the French nuclear industry is more than ever suspended at the end of this nightmare project for EDF. "