Finland’s long troubled Olkiluoto unit 3 nuclear construction project has hit another snag, related to what appears to be increasing problems with the steam turbine generators in the delayed, 1,600-MW unit.
Reuters reported this week that the Finnish utility TVO in a statement said “it has received additional information from the plant supplier Areva-Siemens consortium that the regular electricity production from the OL3 EPR [a French-designed third generation pressurized light water reactor-Ed.] plant unit will be further postponed for three months due to extended turbine overhaul and inspection works.”
The utility added, “During the turbine inspection works, the plant supplier has decided to extend the overhaul to all three low-pressure turbines in order to perform further inspections on them.”
Finnish nuclear regulators in March gave a green light to start loading fuel in the unit, where construction began in 2005 with a wildly optimistic startup in 2009. After many delays, some as a result of what appears to have been design errors, the plan to start production slipped to October 2021. But TVO late last month bumped the date back to November, and this month pushed the projected startup to March 2022, according to World Nuclear News.
As WNN reported, the delay causes further damage to Areva-Siemens, which has also faced serious problems with an EPR construction project in Flamanville, France, and operating problems at the only EPR in operation in Taishan, China.
TVO’s problems with Olkiluoto 3 have caused the utility and its regulators to scrap plans for a unit 4, a joint Finnish-Russian project for an unspecified light water reactor.
Unit 3 was the first new nuclear project in Finland in 40 years. Units 1 and 2, each rated at 890-MW of capacity, are boiling water reactors. Unit 1 began commercial operation in October 1979 and Unit 2 a year later.
–Kennedy Maize