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The service life of the oldest French nuclear reactors can be extended from 40 to 50 years under certain conditions.
This emerges from a statement by the French nuclear regulator Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN), which was published in Paris on Thursday.
The authority made a series of repairs to prevent nuclear accidents in the 32 oldest reactors.
According to Greenpeace, 13 of these old reactors have already exceeded the maximum age of 40 years originally planned by the mostly state-owned operating company Electricité de France (EDF).
The French government paved the way for the extension in April 2020.
France gets around 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, the highest proportion worldwide.
The extension affects, among other things, the Bugey nuclear power plant east of Lyon, which has been in operation since the late 1970s.
The reactors in Dampierre south of Paris and Tricastin north of Avignon, which have been producing electricity since the early 1980s, are also affected.
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France finally shut down its oldest nuclear power plant in Fessenheim on the Upper Rhine not far from Freiburg im Breisgau in June of last year.
Germany and Switzerland had insisted on it for years because of numerous breakdowns.