COUNTRY PAVILLIONS | WNE2025 France: Boosting nuclear capacity with new build
A long-time leader in nuclear generation, France still produces about 70% of its electricity from reactors and has a series of new builds on the cards
Since the oil crises of the 1970s when France adopted nuclear power as its core generation technology the country has produced the majority of its electricity from nuclear. That still holds true and today France derives about 70% of its power from its 57 operable nuclear reactors. As a low-cost energy resource, France’s nuclear fleet of some
63 GWe has allowed it to become the world’s largest exporter of electricity, bringing in billions of Euro of revenue annually. In 2022 France revealed plans to continue its nuclear legacy and build six new reactors. This is in addition to the Flamanville EPR, a pressurised water design designed by Framatome and EDF that has been built on the west coast of Brittany. Flamanville 3 was initially scheduled to begin commercial operations in 2012 or 2013 but was finally commissioned and began operating late last year. Flamanville 3 was connected to the national grid on 21 December 2024. Plans for the additional reactors are advancing and in March
this year France’s Nuclear Policy Council – headed by President Emmanuel Macron –agreed that a subsidised government loan should be issued to cover at least half the construction costs of the six reactors.
These units will be of the EPR2 design, essentially and EPR but optimised on the basis of learnings from operating units like Flamanville, Taishan in China and Hinkley Point C in the UK. An existing reactor site, Penly in Normandy, northern France, is the preferred location where the first pair of EPR2 reactors is planned. Penly will be followed by Gravelines and Bugey sites with a pair of reactors planned for each. The cost was originally estimated at EUR51.7bn (US$56.4 billion), but this was revised to EUR67.4bn in 2023. An option for a further eight EPR2 reactors is to follow this initial six units with construction expected to start in 2027.
A financial framework is based on a subsidised government
loan covering at least half of the construction costs and a Contract for Difference on nuclear production at a maximum price of EUR100/MWh in 2024 value. On this basis EDF is expected to make a final investment decision in 2026. In recent years French nuclear output had plunged after a
large chunk of its reactor fleet taken offline in 2022 for repairs after stress corrosion cracking was discovered initially at Civaux 1 then in other N4 units at Civaux 2 and Chooz B2 and then at Penly 1, a P’4 series design and one of 12 units in service in France. Nonetheless, according to EDF since the beginning of the year to August, cumulative annual output was 240 TWh, up by 5.4 TWh compared to 2024 as a result of good availability of the reactors in operation and shorter than expected outages. Beyond its work on multiple EPR reactors, both domestically and including the UK’s Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, EDF is also pursuing development of an SMR design. The company’s Nuward subsidiary recently relaunched development of its SMR after announcing plans in 2024 to optimise the design. A 340 MWe SMR plant with two 170 MWe pressurised water reactors (PWRs), according to Nuward’s original SMR roadmap, detailed design and formal application for a new nuclear facility was scheduled to begin in 2026 with first concrete in France planned for 2030. Construction of that first unit was expected to take three years. However, optimising the design by focusing on existing and proven technologies will see the Nuward SMR will deliver 400 MWe and an option for cogeneration, up to approximately 100 MWt. Now the aim is to finalise the conceptual design of the reactor by mid-2026 and market a product for the 2030s, with a First-Of-A-Kind (FOAK) built in France.
This Image: Flamanville unit 3 was connected to the grid at the end of last year. Source: ANS
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