The design for Westinghouse’s AP-1000 has recently been rejected by the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission because ‘a key component might not withstand events like earthquakes and tornadoes’. The projected cost of building them varies wildly as well.
GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) remains in the ‘early design stage’. Late last year, US energy corporation Exelon dropped plans to build a ESBWR in Texas because the ESBWR wouldn’t have earned them the vital government loan guarantees that keep the nuclear industry afloat. GE Hitachi also withdrew the design from the UK’s currently ongoing reactor evaluation process.
Canada’s Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) also withdrew their ACR-1000 reactor design from the UK process. In July last year Canada’s own province of Ontario pulled the plug on plans to build two ACR-1000s after the project was priced at 26 billion Canadian dollars, three times what the province wanted to pay.
Which leaves us with French nuclear ogre Areva’s infamous European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) design. Two are currently under construction in the world – one in Olkiluoto in Finland and one in Flamanville in France. The EPR design has quickly become a symbol for everything wrong with the nuclear industry – expensive, late, unreliable, and farcical.
How are things going at those construction sites right now. Well, after it being announced that its anybody’s guess as to when the Olkiluoto OL3 reactor may be ready (it’s currently four years late), Areva said this week that the EPR at Flamanville is now running two years late as well. The company is also making a EUR 300 million provision on top of OL3’s rapidly expanding – and profit-killing – EUR 5.5 billion budget.
In fact, all you need to know about building an EPR reactor is summed up in this simple graph…
The graph upturns at the precise moment construction began. How much higher will those lines reach?
The nuclear industry is starting to look like its own worst enemy.
– from weblog.greenpeace.org