France has been having problems lately with a major supplier of nuclear hardware. In 2014, investigations by the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) revealed that the world's largest nuclear power plant being constructed at Flamanville had falsified quality control documents for some of the parts being used to construct the plant. The Flamanville plant was intended to showcase the new European Pressurized Reactor design.
Reactor vessels from the Le Creusot foundry were made of steel that contained about fifty percent more carbon than they should have. This made the steel about half as strong as it needed to be to meet regulatory requirements for reactor vessels. Such weak steel could crack and cause catastrophic accidents.
The ASN contacted China and warned them of possible problems involving the high carbon steel in components being used in the construction of two EPRs. A further investigation into the foundry records at Le Creusot discovered many cases of altered or forged test documents for nuclear components.
As a result of these revelations, the ASN ordered that twenty French nuclear power plants be shut down immediately so that "preventive measures could be taken immediately to ensure public safety." The actions of the ASN have generated concern across Europe that Électricité de France SA’s (EDF’s) nuclear power plants might not be safe.
In addition to substandard parts from Le Creusot foundry in France, parts provided for EDF projects supplied by Japan Casting and Forging Corporation have also found to have forged and false quality control documents. As a result, the Japanese government has also started investigations of their fleet of nuclear reactors, most of which have remained out of service since the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. As I have mentioned in past posts, less than one-half of the nuclear components produced in Japan are inspected before they are exported.
Because of the shutdown of the twenty nuclear power plants in France, there are fears that there will be a shortage of electricity this winter in France which produces about seventy-five percent of its electricity from nuclear power. With the loss of about a third of the output of their electricity from nuclear power reactors, France has had to turn to other forms of energy. France is now reopening some of its mothballed coal-fired power plants that have been shut down for thirty-two years. Germany, which is shutting down all of its nuclear power reactors, will also be restarting old coal-fired power plants in order to sell electricity to France.
There is a new type of nuclear power reactor that is being developed called a small modular reactor or SMR. These new reactors feature simplified design and produce less than three hundred megawatts. They can be produced in a factory and assembled on site. One of the promised benefits of this approach is that the SMRs are manufactured in factories and will be based on a standardized design and standard components. On the one hand, this could result in better quality control and lower costs. On the other hand, as the events in France have illustrated, factory produced nuclear components are only as good as the quality control process at the factory. If there are failures of quality control at such factories, many SMRs might have to be shut down due to problems with substandard components.
