Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     EDF is over forty-five billion dollars in debt. It has fallen further into financial difficulty and announced that its 2022 profit would drop by thirty billion dollars because of the problems with its reactors. In addition, there is a government effort to force EDF to provide artificially cheap electricity for business and households.
      Even as EDF is working hard to comply with the demand for accelerated repairs to its reactor fleet, the company cut its 2022 nuclear power production estimate last week. The announcement caused the cost of French and European electricity to jump.
      Efforts to repair corrosion in pipes that cool the cores of four reactors are taking longer that expected. Those reactors will not start until January or February.
      A strike late last month by French nuclear plant workers demanding higher wages to keep up with inflation caused more disruptions to power generation. EDF said it  was already behind in performing required maintenance on several aging reactors because of lockdowns related to the coronavirus. The labor strikes put it even further behind schedule.
     The company’s recent problems began late last year as it starting working through the backlog of needed repairs. The inspections unearthed alarming safety issues at an older-generation nuclear reactor in southwest France called Civaux 1. This involved corrosion and micro-cracks in the systems that cool a reactor’s radioactive core. As EDF investigated its nuclear facilities, it discovered sixteen reactors that faced similar risks and closed them down. This is especially concerning because most of the sixteen reactors are newer generation model.
     Officials suspected that the corrosion resulted from design changes that EDF had made to reactors designed by Westinghouse Electric that EDF had used in its older generation nuclear power plants. Bernard Doroszczuk is the head of France’s Nuclear Safety Authority. He testified to French lawmakers this summer that the modifications, used in later generation reactors, appeared to have caused abnormal corrosion and stress on critical cooling pipes.
     The crisis has caused French nuclear power production to drop to a thirty year low. France is generating less than half of the sixty-one gigawatts that the reactors should be able to produce. (EDF also uses gas, coal and renewable sources to generate electricity.) Even when more reactors are restarted in the coming months, French nuclear output will only be about forty-five gigawatts. This is lower than usual for winter months and will compound the impact of Russian gas cutoff.
     Fabian Ronningen is a senior analyst at Rystad Energy which is an independent consultancy. He said that the situation “increases the risk of supply shortages for the coming winter, with availability standing at record-low levels for this time of the year.” 
     The energy shortfall has turn France into a net importer of electricity instead of the continent’s biggest exporter of electricity. One fourth of Europe’s electricity comes from nuclear power plants in about a dozen countries. France used to produce more than half of the total.
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