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The European Power Reactor (EPR) is a third-generation pressurized water reactor design. It was mainly developed by Framatome, a French company that was part of Areva, EDF, a French utility and Siemens in Germany.
Construction was begun by Areva in 2005 on the first EPR called Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. It was supposed to go into operation in 2010. The Olkiluoto 3 has taken about three times as long to construct as originally estimated. The original estimate of about three and a half billion dollars has also tripled. The Olkiluoto 3 project has suffered from legal battles over compensation claims.
Areva’s second EPR project is being built at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant in France and is referred to as Flamanville 3. Construction of that EPR began in 2007 and it was supposed to be completed in 2012 at an estimated cost of three billion eight hundred million dollars. It is still being built and the estimated cost has swelled to twelve billion six hundred million dollars.
It is still not clear exactly when these two EPR projects will be completed and put into operation. A recent report on these two projects said that it was possible the both could begin delivering power to the grid by the end of 2019.
Officially, Olkiluoto 3 is scheduled to begin delivering full power in January of 2020. Fuel will be loaded into the reactor in June of 2019 and it will be connected to the grid in October at which point it will be considered to be in operation.
The Flamanville 3 reactor is almost completed but will probably not come online in 2019. Fuel will be loaded in the fall of 2019 but power will not start flowing before 2020. In July of this year, many of the welds of the Flamanville 3 reactor were found to be substandard and had to be redone. It will be connected to the grid in first quarter of 2020 with commercial power production scheduled for the second quarter.
After signing contracts for Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3, Areva sold two EPRs to China for installation at a nuclear power plant in Taishan, Guangdong. There were problems during the construction with both of the Chinese reactors but Taishan 1 began sending electricity to the grid in June of 2018. It started commercial operation in December of 2018. Taishan 2 is scheduled to be operational this year.
All of the problems with schedule delays and cost overruns have caused analysts to question the integrity and viability of the EPR design. Attempts have been made to sell EPRs to the U.K., India and Saudi Arabia. More EPRs will probably have to be constructed in France to improve the reputation of the EPR.
Edward Kee is with the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group in Washington, D.C. He said that prospects for more EPR sales are “uncertain, at best”. He went on to say, “The EPR appears to be difficult to build and may not be an attractive technology compared with other offerings. The French government seems to have little interest in or capacity to enter into the broader government-to-government and project funding arrangements that Russian and Chinese nuclear vendors are offering.”