Following on from yesterday’s news that the new OL3 EPR nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland has been delayed once again, Greenpeace are launching a real word version of the OL3 counter (get one for your own website here)…

click for a larger view

The three-meter counter – pulled by an electric car and powered by wind - shows the extra cost that French taxpayers and Finnish electricity consumers will have to pay thanks to the OL3’s skyrocketing budget and botched construction.

That figure starts at 2.86 billion euros and climbs by 3,190 euros every minute. How much development of renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes has OL3 single-handedly blocked? It’s up there in red and black.

(More information in Finnish is available on the Greenpeace Finland website.)

Posted by Justin at 4:21 PM | Permalink

Sorry we’re late posting to the blog today, we’ve only just finished mopping up the tears of laughter that flooded the office after we read this…

The construction of Finland’s fifth commercial nuclear reactor, which is being built in Olkiluoto on the west coast of Finland, has been delayed once again…

Already three years late and billions over budget Frecnh nuclear giant AREVA’s so-called flagship European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), says Jouni Silvennoinen, a project manager at the Finnish nuclear power company Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), ‘should be more or less completed by the end of 2012’.

More or less? Can a ‘more or less completed’ nuclear reactor generate electricity we ask ourselves. It’s highly unlikely. Just because a reactor is ‘more or less completed’ doesn’t mean it can do anything useful. The original timetable reserved six months for testing meaning the reactor could be operating in the summer of 2013.

However, a more realistic timetable for the operational permit would be 12 months, meaning electricity production would start in early 2014. This mean the construction time of the OL3 reactor will have doubled from four and a half years to nine. That will mean it will be completed five years and 13 years after the Finnish government gave the go ahead to build it. Plus, all this assumes there will be no more problems or delays at Olkiluoto on top of the thousands of construction defects we’ve already seen there.

The most important and difficult construction stages - the installation of heavy components and the control systems, along with the application for an operating permit – have still to be done. ‘There are hundreds and thousands of components, hundreds of kilometres of cables, as well as pipelines. That will certainly take time,’ says Jouni Silvennoinen.

The supposedly state of the art EPR was supposed to launch the nuclear ‘renaissance’ on a wave of optimism with countries around the world queuing up to build them. It’s quickly become a symbol of the incompetence and comedy of the nuclear industry. Would you put money on everything running smoothly from here on at Olkiluoto, knowing what we know? We certainly wouldn’t.

Posted by Justin at 4:52 PM | Permalink

That’s ‘More nuclear waste for our children’ in Finnish and is the message Greenpeace Finland campaigners took to the construction site of the OL3 nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland.

The activists skied and canoed to the scandal-prone reactor [http://www.google.com/search?q=olkiluoto&sitesearch=weblog.greenpeace.org%2Fnuclear-reaction%2F] to demand that construction be stopped. They were able to climb a crane on the site and unfurl their banner.

In the light of the Greenpeace action, the Finnish nuclear safety authority STUK announced that security measures at the OL3 site are inadequate. If Greenpeace can get there, who else? Just one more reason why nuclear power can’t be trusted.

The two existing reactors in Olkiluoto produce 40 tons of extremely radioactive nuclear waste. Fifteen hundred tons, or 250 truckloads, of the material is in intermediate storage in Olkiluoto. The Olkiluoto 3 reactor, if completed, would produce another 25 tons per year of waste that is dramatically more radioactive than that from existing reactors. The new reactor is designed to burn uranium more intensely and, as a consequence, the resulting nuclear waste contains up to seven times more easily released, extremely toxic substances.

A permanent nuclear waste dumpsite is planned underground in Olkiluoto for all high-level nuclear waste produced in Finnish nuclear reactors. The plan is to bury the waste on the Olkiluoto island, on the coast of the Baltic sea and partially directly under the sea. Once the waste containment fails, radioactive contamination would spread into the Baltic sea in 50-100 years. The planned nuclear waste dumpsite would be an environmental crime, not a solution to nuclear waste.

(More information is available in Finnish on the Greenpeace Finland website. The action was covered by the Finnish media. You can see more here.)

Posted by Justin at 1:38 PM | Permalink

Olkiluoto in Finland has the eyes of the world on it. That’s where French nuclear corporation AREVA is building the world’s first European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). With its state of the art third generation design, the EPR is the reactor that is going to kick off the nuclear ‘renaissance’ in style, with countries around the world queuing up to buy the design. Apparently.

AREVA took careful steps to make sure they marketed their ground-breaking technology properly. The OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto is three years late and 2.75 billion euros over budget. The project has been inundated with thousands of construction defects and safety concerns, and has single-handedly hammered AREVA’s profits. How’s that for salesmanship? What was heralded as the poster child of the nuclear ‘renaissance’ has turned out to be its enfant terrible.

To make matters worse AREVA are engaged in a rather undignified public squabble with TVO, the Finnish utility that commisioned the reactor. TVO say it’s AREVA’s fault the reactor’s late. No, say AREVA, it’s TVO’s fault and TVO owe us money. No, say TVO, AREVA owes us money. NO! say AREVA. NO! say TVO. YOU! say AREVA. YOU! say TVO.

We’ve seen playground fights show more diplomacy. Just how this is going down with other countries thinking about using AREVA’s reactor building services is anyone’s guess. TVO have announced this week that OL3 will be complete in the second half of 2012. Going on past experience, you’d be a fool to bet money on that date staying fixed.

The use of the word ‘complete’ is also interesting in this context. It’s possible the reactor will be completely built in the second half of 2012 but that’s different to it actually producing electricity on a commercial basis. That could take months and even longer. The saga of Olkiluoto has a long way to go yet.

Posted by Justin at 3:03 PM | Permalink

So, without a doubt, nuclear power fails the safety, economic and reliability tests. Is it, however, flexible? Not so much.

Over the last year it became much more clear that the problem with nuclear (and coal) power stations is that they are too inflexible to be able to fit in energy system with higher percentages of renewable sources.

The nuclear industry responded by saying that reactors could ‘load-follow’ (which means they rapidly adjust their power output according to fluctuating demands for electricity). However this depends very much on the power plant design.

French nuclear corporation AREVA’s so-called state of the art third generation EPR reactor design has already been criticised for lacking this flexibility. French utility EDF who are building an EPR at Flamanville in France have tried to prove the contrary and ordered design changes that would make the reactor able to respond to changing power demands.

Unfortunately this ambition has been stymied by the EPR’s own safety system. The proposed design for the EPR’s reactor core means that it will not be able to rapidly increase or decrease its power output. That is, it won’t be able to ‘load-follow’.

Countries looking to adopt the EPR may now face a choice: lots of centralised, inflexible electricity generation or decentralised flexible power generated by renewables. The two don’t go together at all well.

Expect a lot of pressure from the centralised power industry in the coming months. The battle for the control of the grid is about to begin.

(With thanks to Jan Haverkamp, Greenpeace EU Policy Campaigner on dirty energy)

Posted by Justin at 3:44 PM | Permalink

When he announced the UK’s nuclear ‘renaissance’, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government insisted it would create 100,000 new jobs. That figure has since fallen to by 10% to 90,000 but that’s still a big promise.

Thanks to French nuclear company AREVA, however, we’re now getting an idea of how those numbers break down and the spin around nuclear job creation is revealed.

AREVA’s EPR reactor is one of two designs the UK government is looking at building and is also being considered in the US...

…a new U.S. EPR™ would create up to 11,000 direct and indirect jobs during component manufacturing (including AREVA’s Newport News heavy component facility in Virginia) and plant construction. On top if this, construction and operation would also create more than 400 permanent jobs and spur billion of dollars in investment in the local economy.

The UK government wants ten new reactors, so that would create 110,000 ‘direct and indirect’ jobs according to AREVA's numbers, wouldn’t it? Well, it might. That number is in the same ballpark as the UK government’s figures of 90,000-100,000 but it assumes that all ten reactors are built at the same time.

It also assumes there will be no overlap between the people working on one reactor and the people working on another. Do we expect that there will be no transfer of skills between reactor projects especially in a time when nuclear expertise is scarce? Are there enough contractors with enough experienced workers and resources to provide 110,000 of them simultaneously?

If anything, these jobs will be highly transient. As the campaign group Shepperdine Against Nuclear Energy found when it visited the Okiluoto 3 EPR construction site in Finland late last year, ‘4,300 workers work on the site, but a total of 16,300 people have worked on site between 2005 and to date’. That doesn’t sound like job security to us.

Also, can the UK government guarantee that all those jobs will go to British workers? It looks like Westinghouse, the other company whose reactor design is being considered by the UK, would rely on thousands of workers from overseas. As Bulgaria found with its Belene reactor when it had to import foreign expertise, these promises of new jobs are not always kept.

Then there’s the final sting in the tail of the nuclear jobs spin. According to AREVA building an EPR creates only around 400 permanent jobs. The rest will, by any definition, be temporary jobs. That falls a long way short of the ‘100,000 jobs’ hype. No wonder the workers at Olkiluoto are taking their time.

Posted by Justin at 4:52 PM | Permalink

Do you know many companies like the nuclear industry who have only one product in their catalogue? There was Ford and the Model T, but that was 100 years ago, and they at least knew how to build and sell it.

We wish we’d come up with that joke. The honour however goes to Henri Proglio, the new chief executive of the French nuclear giant EDF. When even the nuclear industry is mocking the nuclear industry, you know things aren’t right.

So how is the nuclear ‘renaissance’ going this week? Not well, in actual fact…

The UK’s safety regulators, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), have just released the third stage of their assessment for the designs of AREVA’s EPR and Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors. It’s grim reading.

There are a significant number of issues with the safety features of both designs. The regulators still don't have a complete design yet from either Areva or Westinghouse. The HSE will not approve the designs unless this is addressed.

The EPR design has a long list of problems. There are "significant concerns" about the lack of separation between the safety protection and control systems. The HSE says "you could have the same fault occurring on both, so your protection system won't do what it's supposed to do. The company has proposed a way to fix the problem, but has yet to provide details". Concrete reactor shielding may not meet UK standards (the question is whether it meets any standards at all). There are problems with the structural integrity of the reactor but it’s "too early to say whether they can be resolved solely with additional safety case changes or whether they may result in design modifications being necessary". Unbelievably, even simple, fundamental things such as fire doors and alarms are not properly sited.

(You can take a look at some of the many safety failings of the EPR reactor being built at Olkiluoto here.)

Things with the AP1000 are little better. According to the HSE, Westinghouse has significant additional work to prove its reactor is safe across "the majority of the technical topic areas.". The safety case on internal hazards has "significant shortfalls." The regulator criticises Westinghouse for a "lack of detailed claims and arguments". There are major concerns about the reactor design’s new cooling valve but there has been, says the HSE, "minimal progress in addressing our concerns. There is a significant risk that the depth of the issue and the resources and effort that are needed to address it have been underestimated.". On top of all that aspects of the civil and mechanical engineering plans are being questioned, as well as the structural integrity and "human factors".

Wow. That’s quite a list. If the EPR was a car with a list of concerns like that, would you drive it? If the AP1000 was a plane, would you fly in it?

Meanwhile, UK government ministers are complacently unconcerned…

Posted by Justin at 5:01 PM | Permalink

An independent expert commissioned by Greenpeace has found the two nuclear reactors currently being built in Finland and France have serious safety flaws in their design. Dr. Helmut Hirsch, Scientific Consultant for Nuclear Safety says the design of AREVA’s much heralded third-generation EPR reactor is ‘contradictory to the foundation of nuclear safety’.

A nuclear reactor’s control systems are supposed to be independent, so that a failure of one system doesn’t compromise the whole reactor. This is not the case with the EPR – its systems are interlinked. ‘In the worst case,’ says Dr Hirsch, ‘this can lead to a minor incident developing into a severe accident.’ This has led to the nuclear regulators in the UK (who are evaluating the EPR design as part of their nuclear ‘renaissance’), France and Finland to jointly express their concern with this design flaw.

This is on top of ongoing serious problems at the construction of the OL3 EPR at Olkiluoto, Finland. Last week it was found that the pipes in the reactor’s essential cooling system (the part of the reactor that prevents a meltdown) have been welded using unacceptable methods without any supervision or written records. The surface of the pipes had been welded to cover up damage which may have weakened the pipes beyond repair.

The number of defects in OL3’s construction is around 3,000. The Finnish nuclear regulator STUK has detected many that were in fact approved by AREVA’s quality control but can we be certain that STUK has found them all? In 2006 STUK admitted that they could not be sure due to the high number of problems.

What we can be certain of however is that the EPR reactor is a dangerous and failed experiment. The safety flaws highlighted by Dr Hirsch reveal that there can be no confidence in the safety of the EPR design. The massive budget and schedule overruns show that a programme of building EPRs across the planet, as AREVA plans, presents a very real threat to the fight against climate change. Neither must we forget the legacy of nuclear accidents.

EPR, like nuclear power as a whole, not only threatens our safety, but takes and wastes the vital money, time and resources that we need to expand renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes if we are serious about saving our climate. The risks are too great. EPR must be abandoned immediately.

Read Dr. Hirsch’s report here. Greenpeace’s EPR factsheet is here.

Posted by Justin at 3:01 PM | Permalink

The Happy Ranger carrying both steam generators - for AREVA's disaster-prone OL3 EPR nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland - and eight Greenpeace activists arrived at their destination this afternoon. After the formalities of Finnish immigration, our heroes are now enjoying well deserved baths, hot dinners and celebrations.

A press conference will be held in Helsinki on Friday and we'll bring you all the details from there. This isn't the end of the story so stay tuned.

(A full briefing on Areva's OL3, its many safety issues and negative impact on Finnish climate policy is available here. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, blogged the experience here. There are photos and video, and more photos.)

Posted by Justin at 1:26 PM | Permalink

French nuclear giant AREVA is upset by the six Greenpeace activists who boarded the transport ship Happy Ranger in the Fehmarn Belt strait between Denmark and Germany. The ship is taking massive steam generators to the construction site of AREVA’s beleaguered OL3 EPR nuclear reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland.

The company says it is ‘saddened that Greenpeace refuses to engage in a calmer debate on energy issues’. Just how this ‘calmer debate’ is supposed to take place in the eyes of AREVA remains unclear. AREVA studiously ignore the issues raised on this blog, for example, although we know AREVA people are avid readers. And a visit to the facility where these large EPR components have been produced will not advance us in the debate on how nuclear energy undermines climate protection or how the choice for nuclear power has shut the door for renewable energies in Finland. A calmer debate? Greenpeace is ready when you are, AREVA.

©Greenpeace/Mueller

The company certainly wasn’t interested in calm debate at the European Commission’s European Nuclear Energy Forum (Enef) this year. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Sortir du Nucléaire - the only groups invited into the industry-dominated body - walked out accusing Enef of ‘stifling critical voices’, ‘ignoring their concerns and riding roughshod over alternative scientific evidence’. If the likes of AREVA are so sure of themselves and their reactors you have to wonder why they have to resort to such cover-up and cowardice.

On top of that, AREVA spokesperson Jacques-Emmanuel Saulnier seems to think some kind of ‘association’ is ‘opening up’ between AREVA and Greenpeace just because a Greenpeace team visited the AREVA uranium mines in Niger last week. As if inviting people to the hellish nightmare of what AREVA has done in Niger would endear the company to anyone.

In its Happy Ranger press release AREVA also uses a rather strange and inappropriate metaphor…

To quote a well-known saying, "Our house is burning and we are looking the other way". If we apply this metaphor, then Greenpeace's attempts to stand in the way of nuclear power is like preventing a trusted fire service from getting to the blaze.

AREVA is comparing nuclear reactors to a ‘fire service’ fighting against the ‘burning’ that is climate change. Now, we don’t know about you, but if our house was burning we’d want the fire service at the scene immediately. We wouldn’t want the fire service being massively delayed and taking years to arrive like AREVA's nuclear reactors are. By the time the AREVA fire truck arrives the house could be in ruins. And just imagine the highly toxic and radioactive extinguishing chemicals that AREVA uses when trying to put out this fire. Even if they managed to save the house, it would be uninhabitable for thousands and thousands of years.

And don’t get us started on ‘trusted’.

(Get the latest news on the Greenpeace activists’ progress on Greenpeace Finland’s Twitter feed and Nuclear Reaction’s Twitter feed. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, is blogging here. There are photos and video, and more photos.)

Posted by Justin at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Happy Ranger is taking up speed again with after stopping when two more Greenpeace activists boarded the ship between Gotland and Öland. There are now eight activists aboard bearing witness to this transport of main components of the new Finnish reactor at Olkiluoto - Lauri, Rosa, Tuomas, Mai, Andreas, Jacky, Elisabeth, and Niko.

The Happy Ranger is expected to arrive in Finland tomorrow afternoon.

(Get the latest news on the Greenpeace activists’ progress on Greenpeace Finland’s Twitter feed and Nuclear Reaction’s Twitter feed. One of the activists on board, Lauri Myllyvirta, is blogging here. Here are photos and video, and more photos.)

Posted by Justin at 3:30 PM | Permalink

When I was woken up for my watch at 4 am, I had a liter of water in my sleeping bag.

Read Lauri's latest blog post from from the deck of the Happy Ranger...

Posted by Justin at 9:28 AM | Permalink

Greenpeace Finland nuclear campaigner Lauri Myllyvirta is blogging from the deck of the Happy Ranger which Lauri and five colleagues boarded today as the ship transports steam generators to the construction site of AREVA's EPR nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto, Finland.

Find out more here.

Posted by Justin at 10:54 PM | Permalink

A few days ago the cargo ship The Happy Ranger left France carrying steam generators intended for the nuclear European Pressurised Reactor under construction in Olkiluoto, Finland. As the ship made its way from France to Finland, activists from the Arctic Sunrise boarded the cargo ship and are currently occupying the cranes on deck.

Read on...

The activists have not been removed and intend to stay on board all the way to Finland.

Photos of the action can be seen here and here. The Greenpeace press release is here.

The EPR reactor could be coming to your country. It's worth finding out why that might be a bad idea. You can find out more about this ill-fated reactor on Greepeace's factsheet and read its disastrous history recorded here on Nuclear Reaction.

Update: Greenpeace Finland nuclear campaigner Lauri Myllyvirta is blogging from the deck of the Happy Ranger.

Posted by Justin at 6:45 PM | Permalink

There are days when you simply run out of words. How to continue to describe the ongoing construction of the flagship OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, Finland? We’ve done ‘disastrous’, ‘incompetent’ and ‘farce’. Add to those ‘massively over-budget’ and ‘hugely behind schedule’.

We’re at a loss to describe the latest news from the construction site…

The pipes that form the cooling system around the reactor have been partially welded without any supervision. TVO and Areva are right now investigating how much of the work must be redone and what the consequences are.

This pertains to the same pipes whose weld seams have been investigated before. This time the weld seams are not concerned but welding has been performed to cover cosmetic damages on the surface of the pipes. Welding work has not been, however, documented.

If the entire primary coolant piping had to be redone, it would take three years.

The cooling system is the very important bit of the reactor that prevents the thing getting too hot and going into meltdown. Imagine being the press officer for OL3. We’re struggling to think of a more depressing job.

The EPR, if you need reminding, is supposed to be the most advanced reactor on the planet. The top dog. The big man. Numero uno. This is the design – which its owners AREVA are selling around the world – that is, according to the propaganda, going to usher in the so-called nuclear ‘renaissance’ and lead us to a glorious future where nuclear-generated electricity is abundant, cheap, clean and pixies in funny little hats caper around for our entertainment.

And yet here we are again. Fundamental mistakes at Olkiluoto are compounded by the repetition of the same fundamental mistakes. The OL3 project has been notorious from the very beginning for its inability to get something as essential as the reactor’s welding right – non-existent supervision, lack of training and instructions, and poor quality work.

You’d expect a five year old child to learn lessons faster and shake your head in bitter disappointment if they didn’t. You know when kids do something stupid and you have to tell them not to do it, then they do it again, then again, and you think you're going to go insane with frustration? It must be a bit like at OL3.

AREVA however are hailed around the world by gullible leaders and journalists as potential saviours of the human race. Like we said – words have failed us.

Posted by Justin at 4:53 PM | Permalink

As we’ve discussed before, there are two questions asked about building a nuclear reactor – ‘How much will it cost?’ and ‘When will it be operational?’- to which there is only one, honest reply: ‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished.’

This week, however, lumbering French nuclear ogre AREVA added a third question to the list: ‘What will the design look like?’…

In an unprecedented step, the UK nuclear safety regulator (HSE’s ND), the French nuclear regulator (ASN), and the Finnish nuclear regulator (STUK) released a joint statement on their respective evaluations of the design of AREVA’s shiny all-singing, all-dancing state-of-the-art third generation EPR Pressurised Water Reactor. You see, all three have discovered the same problem with the reactor’s design…

The issue is primarily around ensuring the adequacy of the safety systems (those used to maintain control of the plant if it goes outside normal conditions), and their independence from the control systems (those used to operate the plant under normal conditions).

Independence is important because, if a safety system provides protection against the failure of a control system, then they should not fail together. The EPR design, as originally proposed by the licensees and the manufacturer, AREVA, doesn’t comply with the independence principle, as there is a very high degree of complex interconnectivity between the control and safety systems.

In short: the EPR’s safety system isn’t independent from its control system. The safety system is there, in case the control system fails, to prevent catastrophic accidents. In EPR’s case, if the control system fails, the currently non-independent safety system could fail as well. And AREVA wants to sell the EPR all over the world.

Needless to say, AREVA responded with an awesome piece of denial, spin and downright fantasy…

The safety of the EPR™ reactor has not been called into question…

Really? So clearly ‘The issue is primarily around ensuring the adequacy of the safety systems’ and ‘The EPR design… doesn’t comply with the independence principle’ actually means ‘there’s nothing to worry about’. Silly us. Need we remind you that the OL3 EPR reactor in Olkiluoto, Finland has been under construction since 2004, the EPR at Flamanville, France has been under construction since 2006. And there are still questions about the ‘adequacy’ of the EPR’s safety systems.

AREVA then move straight to the fantasy…

The EPR™ reactor is currently the most powerful reactor in the world...

(No it isn’t – it hasn’t been built yet.)

AREVA guarantees the safety of its reactor…

(It could guarantee snow in Summer but that wouldn’t make it any more likely. AREVA can make as many guarantees as it likes but what will those guarantees be worth after a major accident? Can you clean up nuclear contamination with a guarantee? Figures vary as to the cost of the Chernobyl disaster but a quarter of a trillion dollars is a conservative estimate. Does AREVA have that kind of money? It will be governments and taxpayers who will be paying for any clean-up.)

So what does this mean? What it always does: more cost, more delays, more uncertainty, more spin, more fantasy, and more distraction from the fight against climate change. It means more of the same from AREVA and those who support them.

Posted by Justin at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With the nuclear industry desperately scrambling to get its nuclear ‘renaissance’ off the ground, and the new fleet of third-generation reactors looking distinctly third-rate, it’s worth reminding yourself just where things are heading: costs are rocketing, expectations are plummeting.

Why not help yourself to a souvenir Greenpeace EPR counter for your own website or blog? It comes in two styles…

wide…

…and tall (as you can see at the top right of this page)…

Simply copy and paste the code into your own website or blog template.

How the counter works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start. These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes. A taste of the future for those citizens of countries looking to adopt EPR for their own nuclear ‘renaissances’.

Posted by Justin at 6:10 PM | Permalink

So, we’ve all heard the hype and propaganda about the forthcoming nuclear ‘renaissance’ with its shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors. The thing is, it’s looking as if the biggest barrier to this ‘renaissance’ taking place might actually be that shiny and new so-called third generation of nuclear reactors.

You see, this latest generation of nuclear reactors are, to put it mildly, a little on the flaky side…

The design for Westinghouse’s AP-1000 has recently been rejected by the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission because ‘a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes’. The projected cost of building them varies wildly as well.

GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) remains in the ‘early design stage’. Late last year, US energy corporation Exelon dropped plans to build a ESBWR in Texas because the ESBWR wouldn’t have earned them the vital government loan guarantees that keep the nuclear industry afloat. GE Hitachi also withdrew the design from the UK’s currently ongoing reactor evaluation process.

Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) also withdrew their ACR-1000 reactor design from the UK process. In July last year Canada’s own province of Ontario pulled the plug on plans to build two ACR-1000s after the project was priced at 26 billion Canadian dollars, three times what the province wanted to pay.

Which leaves us with French nuclear ogre Areva’s infamous European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) design. Two are currently under construction in the world – one in Olkiluoto in Finland and one in Flamanville in France. The EPR design has quickly become a symbol for everything wrong with the nuclear industry – expensive, late, unreliable, and farcical.

How are things going at those construction sites right now. Well, after it being announced that its anybody’s guess as to when the Olkiluoto OL3 reactor may be ready (it’s currently four years late), Areva said this week that the EPR at Flamanville is now running two years late as well. The company is also making a EUR 300 million provision on top of OL3’s rapidly expanding – and profit-killing - EUR 5.5 billion budget.

In fact, all you need to know about building an EPR reactor is summed up in this simple graph…

Click image for a larger version

The graph upturns at the precise moment construction began. How much higher will those lines reach?

The nuclear industry is starting to look like its own worst enemy.

Posted by Justin at 1:30 PM | Permalink

Bad news from the construction site of the OL3 EPR nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland arrives with such reliable and alarming regularity you can almost set your watch by it.

First up we have Jouni Silvennoinen, head of OL3 project for Finnish utility TVO, announcing that the reactor might not now be working until 2013, four years later than planned. TVO has now requested a new timetable from Areva, the reactor’s builders. The reasons Silvennoinen gives for this further delay are problems with the EPR reactor’s vital control and instrumentation system design, and ‘accumulation of delays in construction’. And what an ‘accumulation’…

The second piece of bad news is rather more worrying. The Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority Finland (STUK) has suspended welding on OL3’s essential cooling system (one of the most important parts of a nuclear reactor) after…

…STUK’s inspectors noticed deficiencies in the welding of the pipes in the plant’s cooling system between 6th and 8th October 2009. Among the deficiencies observed were that one welder did not have the welding instructions at his disposal, neither was he familiar with the welding requirements, as a result of which an excessive amount of power was being used in the welding. Other deviations noticed concerned the use of shielding gas necessary for welding and the shape of the contact surfaces to be welded.

The reactor’s builders have been told time and time again about the poor standards in the welding of this so-called state of the art nuclear reactor. Why have lessons not been learned? How hard can it be to ensure a welder – working on a nuclear reactor - has proper instructions and knows his equipment?

STUK has previously drawn attention to welding quality and its supervision in the welding of the steel lining of the containment building, amongst others. STUK has also required TVO to take into account what has been learned from this experience in pipe welding and its supervision. The matter will continue to require special attention from TVO as the volume of pipe installation work increases in the near future.

The EPR reactor is supposed to be the future of nuclear power. You don’t need a crystal ball to see what that future’s shaping up to look like. It’s going to be a very expensive future, shoddily built and arriving late. EPR must be stopped.

Posted by Justin at 5:17 PM | Permalink

‘In preparation for this new reactor boom…’

Areva does its bit for public confidence in its new EPR reactor.

Posted by Justin at 3:54 PM | Permalink

The OL3 nuclear European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), being built by French nuclear giant AREVA at Olkiluoto in Finland, is in such desperate financial trouble it has single-handedly wiped out the company’s half year profits.

The company’s operating profit is down by 97 per cent and net profit is down by 79 per cent – all thanks to the disastrous Olkiluoto EPR project. Facing up to the realities of nuclear reactor construction – the only true answer to the question ‘how much does a reactor cost?’ being ‘we’ll tell you when it’s finished’ – AREVA CEO Anne Lauvergeon has finally admitted that it is impossible to predict the final cost of OL3.

When the OL3 project was presented to Finnish government and parliament for (an ultimately positive) decision, TVO said the cost would be EUR 2.5 billion. The contracted fixed budget was EUR 3.2 billion. After years of schedule overruns, safety violations, and thousands of construction defects, the cost of this so-called state-of-the-art third generation reactor - one of just two being built in the world right now – now stands at EUR 5.5 billion. The counter above shows just how much OL3 is over schedule and over budget. To think AREVA describe EPR as ‘a cost effective reactor’.

The profit announcement has resulted in another very public argument between AREVA and the reactor’s owners, Finnish utility TVO. AREVA are demanding TVO help carry some of the financial burden (one billion euros and counting) – despite OL3 being a ‘turnkey’ project with a fixed price – and are threatening to suspend construction until the original contracts are modified.

So now Areva starts blackmailing its Finnish partner in an attempt to force it to cover at least some of the massive cost overrun. Anne Lauvergnon said that Areva will not commence with some of the construction unless TVO agrees to modified contracts. So far, it seems these threats have been made only in the media as TVO says it has not been informed about ‘discontinuing work or presented any conditions for the continuation of work on the OL3 construction site’

The countries – China, UK, US, India, Italy and others – looking to build their own EPRs are surely watching closely. How must potential investors be feeling, watching a reactor builder refusing to complete construction unless contracts are changed in its favour?

The real losers in this are of course Finnish electricity consumers (who face higher bills) and French taxpayers (AREVA is 91 per cent owned by the French state). In other words, the OL3 EPR reactor cannot be completed without massive public subsidies.

Arrogance and a misplaced faith in its own abilities have brought AREVA to this position. Like the rest of the nuclear industry, the EPR reactor is a dangerous and failing experiment (the other EPR being built at Flamanville in France is also hugely over budget and behind schedule, and has seen the same construction problems as OL3). EPR is massively expensive, untried and untested, and a block to the real and urgently needed solutions to climate change – renewable energy sources and energy efficiency programmes.

EPR is unaffordable both financially and environmentally. Construction Olkiluoto must be abandoned.

Posted by Justin at 1:28 PM | Permalink

So how are things going at the construction site of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland? The builders, Areva, can update us…

Sounds like it’s all going perfectly well. No mention of the three year delay until the reactor is completed or the nearly two billion euro cost of that delay. Funny that.

There’s also a curious figure on Areva’s blog concerning the number of people working to complete the OL3 EPR: 3,500 to be precise. That’s quite a different number from the 9,000 UK environment minister Ed Miliband said each new EPR in the country will provide. Who’s right? As ever when it comes to nuclear power, don’t trust the numbers.

Posted by Justin at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It began in Finland where the first case was discovered. It took hold slowly but is causing widespread concern among the public and scientists despite government assurances. It spread to France and is causing the same alarm there. Both countries seem to be suffering quite badly.

Other countries across the world – the United Kingdom, the US, China, India, the United Arab Emirates and Italy – may also be affected as it looks set to spread. It was announced today that Brazil may be the latest nation to succumb.

Yes, the world is in the grip of EPR fever.

The Finnish and French governments made terrible mistakes when trying to control the disastrous outbreak of these so-called third generation state of the art nuclear reactors in their countries. Instead of quarantining the carrier, French nuclear pariahs Areva, the Finnish and French governments instead allowed Areva to leave taking EPR fever with it.

It now looks as if EPR fever may be spreading to the rest of the world. At this stage, scientists are unable to say how many more will fall victim but it is hoped that other countries will learn the lessons of Finland and France and work hard to prevent outbreaks of their own.

Without wishing to alarm the public, we are nonetheless urging everyone to be vigilant. Although very slow moving, EPR fever may strike at any time and, while it can be easily stamped out with the correct treatment, once it takes hold it can be very difficult to get rid of. It may already be too late for Finland and France but other countries may yet escape if care is taken. The rest of the world should wash its hands of EPR fever.

Posted by Justin at 4:50 PM | Permalink

Nuclear power is cheap, the nuclear industry boasts. Isn’t time that myth was finally laid to rest? The latest example of nuclear’s false financial promise has emerged in Canada in recent days.

Late last month, the Ontario provincial government announced it was postponing its plans to build new nuclear reactors after it was found that the cost would be "billions" too high compared to what the province is able to pay.

Now it turns out that the price tag is in fact three times higher than what was expected: for two Candu reactors is 26 billion Canadian dollars – 16 billion Euros or eight billion each. Two EPR reactors would cost Ontario 23.6 billion Canadian dollars – 14.7 billion Euros or 7.35 billion each.

When Areva persuaded the Finnish government back in 2002 to build the disaster-prone EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, the price they quoted was 2.5 billion Euros (it’s currently costing five billion and counting). Seven years later and an EPR costs nearly three times as much. Talk about inflation!

The two Candu reactors would cost 10,800 Canadian dollars per kilowatt of power capacity. In 2007 the Ontario Power Authority assumed for a price of $2,900 per kilowatt – a third of the actual cost. The EPR price tag now says €4,587 per kilowatt of power capacity, while the International Energy Agency still tends to use a price of €1,600 per kilowatt in policy recommendations. Can you think of any other walk of life where getting figures so wrong would be tolerated? Thank goodness these guys aren’t in the census business – imagine the chaos they’d cause.

So what has the Ontario provincial government done? That’s right, it’s gone to the national government to ask for a bail-out, like a kid begging daddy for a larger allowance.

‘By simplifying any one submission down to a single number at this point would be very difficult to do and highly speculative,’ said Amy Tang, a spokeswoman for the Ontario energy ministry. She’s absolutely right. No-one can ever be sure how much a nuclear reactor will cost, least of all the nuclear industry whose promises and projections should never be believed, until the thing is completed. Going on previous experience, you should expect those figures to rise sharply.

Posted by Justin at 3:36 PM | Permalink

‘If Greenpeace had said at the start that after four years of construction it’s going to be three and a half years late and 60% over budget everybody would have laughed at them.’

(Steve Thomas, Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, speaking about the disastrous construction of the OL3 EPR reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland.)

Posted by Justin at 5:40 PM | Permalink

After Areva - builders of the disaster-prone state-of-the-art third generation OL3 European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) in Olkiluoto, Finland - lost its reputation and credibility over the project, it only had one thing left to lose: its dignity.

And so it happens. The recriminations over just who is to blame for the world’s largest prototype reactor being massively over budget and over schedule, which doubts over its design and construction, have begun. Areva are now engaged in a very public and childish game of he-said-she-said with the reactor’s owners, Finnish utility TVO and nuclear safety agency, STUK.

Jukka Laaksonen, director general of STUK says…

They (Areva) started planning when they won the contract, which was of course too late. They should have used two years for planning (in advance)… The French did not understand at first the Finnish system, that no important device can be built before the plan is approved.

Areva weren’t going to take that lying down and managing director of Finnish operations, Osmo Kaipainen, argued back…

"Authorities are never satisfied" when it comes to meeting safety regulations, he said. He added that TVO was slow delivering Areva-Siemens' documents to STUK for validation, needed before moving from one building task to another.

Those pesky safety agencies and their fussy ways about… safety. Whatever next? We’re not sure if we’d like to eat a meal cooked by an Areva executive – let’s hope they wash their hands and cook the chicken properly.

TVO managed to confuse things further by saying Areva had spent "significantly more time on planning" than the contract asked for. STUK say not enough time was spent by Areva on planning, TVO say too much time was spent. You’d feel sorry for Areva if they hadn’t made a complete disaster of the OL3 construction from the very start and were capable of giving a straight answer to a straight question themselves.

On the whole, Areva, TVO and STUK all look and sound like children squabbling over which of them gets the biggest piece of cake. If it was up to us the three of them would be sent to bed without any supper.

(Apparently Areva have declared the OL3 EPR as the first child of the ‘rebirth of the nuclear industry’. Boy, it’s going to be an ugly baby.)

Posted by Justin at 4:30 PM | Permalink

In May we told you that the review being conducted by the UK’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate into new reactor designs had issues with EDF and Areva’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). Further details are now coming out about how the Inspectorate regards the EPR design as ‘significantly compromised’…

The Health and Safety Executive, which oversees the NII, said that the EPR design could be rejected for use in Britain if its concerns could not be satisfactorily addressed. “It is our regulatory judgment that the control and instrumentation architecture appears overly complex,” the NII letter [to EDF] said. “We have serious concerns about your proposal which allows lower safety class systems to have write access [the ability to override] to higher safety class systems,” it continued.

The letter also highlighted concerns about the absence of safety display systems or manual controls that would allow the reactor to be shut down, either in the station’s control room or at an emergency remote shutdown station.

In other words, the NII don’t trust the designs of EPR’s control and safety systems. Areva is apparently ‘scrambling to produce revised plans’, a situation mirrored in Finland where plans for the control system for the massively late and over-budget EPR being built in Olkiluoto have been described by Finland nuclear watchdog STUK as ‘without a proper design that meets the basic principles of nuclear safety’.

Apparently, in the UK’s case, ‘the design assessment phase could be delayed well past its expected completion in 2011.’ So in Finland, so in the UK. Areva and EDF are nothing if not consistent.

Posted by Justin at 3:33 PM | Permalink

How this works:

The accumulating costs above are based on the EUR 1.7 billion overrun announced by Areva/TVO plus an extra EUR 1.2 billion which will be needed to purchase electricity that has not been produced by Olkiluoto-3 since its projected start.

These costs will eventually be paid for by Nordic electricity consumers and French taxpayers, either through higher bills for customers or through taxes.

The financing of Areva’s EPR programme isn’t going well at all. It needs ‘between eight and 10 billion euros by 2012 to fund its investment programme’ and a desperate French government are putting parts of the company up for sale.

Related posts: EPR: Enfant Terrible of the French Nuclear Industry

Posted by Justin at 1:22 PM | Permalink