Paris, March 8. A major crack detected in the Penly nuclear reactor will force EDF to review its control strategy, after months of corrosion problems in its atomic fleet which have radically reduced its electricity production.
“This is a serious problem affecting their reactors,” said Karine Herviou, deputy director general of the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), a public monitoring body, on France Info radio.
According to Herviou, the crack is “particularly deep” since it is 23 millimeters in a 27 millimeter pipe of the cooling system and the risk is that it could have caused a leak and an accident in this reactor, which was stopped.
The Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), which is the competent body for establishing EDF’s guidelines as a company operating the French nuclear fleet, made up of 56 reactors, announced on Tuesday that it had asked it to ” review its control strategy to take this incident into account.
He did so a day after EDF informed him that, in proceedings launched in recent months in response to pipe corrosion issues, he had located a crack near a weld in the system. reactor safety injection.1 Penly, on the Normandy coast (North West).
ASN noted that EDF had until now considered that this part was not susceptible to the appearance of corrosion cracks, mainly due to its geometry.
Also that the weld had undergone a double repair during the construction of the reactor, which changes the mechanical properties and the resistance capacity of the metal in this area.
While the supervisory authority recognizes that this incident “had no consequences for personnel or the environment”, it affects the safety conditions of reactor cooling due to the potential increase in the probability of a break.
Penly 1 is one of the 16 reactors which had already been identified as likely to be affected by the problem of corrosion of their pipes and which led to a review of their shutdown, with the consequent reduction in electricity production which forced France to import electricity for months to neighboring countries such as Germany, Belgium, Spain or the United Kingdom.
This is one of the elements that weighed on EDF’s results last year, when it posted a historic loss of 17.9 billion euros.
What this incident changes is that the new crack is in a part of the system that was not considered sensitive and the utility will need to change its protocols to verify that there are no other cracks like that of Penly 1. EFE
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