Turkey: The devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria has again raised the issue of whether nuclear power plants can withstand such events. Earthquake safety has long been a consideration in the U.S. and elsewhere, as geologic faults are common and earthquakes entirely unpredictable. Earthquake resistance is on the safety agenda of most advanced, nuclear countries.
The Associated Press reports that the devastating quake “has revived a longstanding debate locally and in neighboring Cyprus about a large nuclear power station being built on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coastline.” Russia’s state-owned Rosatom is building, and will own and operate a nuclear station in Akkuyu, Mersin Province. It will consist of four Russian VVER 1400-MW pressurized water reactors (often referred to ‘Eastinghouse’ reactors, as much of the engineering design seems to have been originally developed in the U.S.). The first unit is expected to come online this year.
The construction project is located some 200 miles from the epicenter of the Feb. 6 7.8 Richter scale magnitude earthquake. Rosatom told the AP that the plant is designed to withstand a 9.0 magnitude quake. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so each increase of 1 in the scale is a multiple of 10 times of the previous number. In an email to the AP, Rosatom said the chance of a 9-magnitude earthquake “is approximately once every 10,000 years. That is exactly how the margin of safety concept is being implemented.”
Hinkley Point C: The U.K.’s Hinkley Point C nuclear project continues to resemble the over-budget, off-schedule Vogtle project in the U.S. The U.K. project is a two-unit, 3,200-MW EPR (nee European Pressurized Water) station under construction in Somerset, England. Electricity de France, which ironically owns British Energy, is building the plant. EDF announced this week that the project will cost $38.5 billion, up from an estimate last May of $30.25 billion, according to Nuclear Engineering International. Scheduled to begin operation in 2027, it now appears likely that the startup date will slip.
China’s General Nuclear Power Corp. (CGN) is a partner in the project. The magazine said CGN “will be asked to provide additional voluntary equity for the project. However, CGN is unlikely offer any additional funding for the project once a previously-agreed equity cap is met, EDF said. This means EDF may have to cover the increase. This is just the latest in a series of cost revisions since the initial estimate of £18bn ($21.8 billion) when the contract was signed with the UK in 2016.”
A U.K. government spokesman said: “New nuclear power is essential to the UK’s energy security, providing clean and affordable homegrown …. We will continue to work closely with EDF to bring Hinkley Point C to completion, the first new nuclear power station in a generation.”
EDF: French government owned EDF is in a world of financial woe. German news service DW last week reported that the giant power company, heavily invested in nuclear power, had a €17.9 billion (about $19 billion) loss for 2022, pushing EDF’s overall debt to €64.5 billion. DW wrote, “The dire 2022 performance was caused by a combination of an unprecedented number of outages at its reactors in France, one of the world’s most nuclear-dependent countries, and the French government’s cap on electricity prices as market prices soared as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
France gets about 70% of its electricity from 56 nuclear plants, and is traditionally an exporter of power to other European countries. But the large nuclear fleet has been taking considerable water of late as a result of serious cracks and other problems in the nation’s aging nuclear fleet, as reported in The Quad Report last May. As of November, only 30 of the country’s 56 nukes were in service. That has since improved to 43 operating nuclear units.
Also, a lack of water has hampered EDF’s nuclear juggernaut. DW notes, “For the first time since 1980, France became a net importer of electricity in 2022, during the year when prices in Europe spiked to never-before-seen levels amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and restrictions on imports of Russian gas and oil and coal. A summer drought also led to further reductions in nuclear power output, with too little water available for cooling at some French reactors.
“The 2022 results were significantly affected by the decline in our electricity output, and also by exceptional regulatory measures introduced in France in difficult market conditions,” chief executive Luc Remont said in a statement. Later, he told a press conference, “Today, our priority is to put EDF back on track.” He was appointed last November to right the ship.
The overall impact of EDF’s woes led to higher prices to consumers. That, in turn, led French President Emmanuel Macron to impose price caps, further eroding EDF’s financials. “In some cases,” DW wrote, “this left EDF buying in electricity at roughly double the price it was then obliged to charge when selling the power on to other French providers.
“Further demonstrating the unusual climate for the company, EDF’s revenue actually increased by roughly 70% year-on-year in 2022 — again a result of the sky high electricity prices — and yet still the company booked the mammoth net losses.”
–Kennedy Maize
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