A leak presented as minor occurred during a hydraulic test in a reactor at the Civaux (Vienne) nuclear power plant, currently closed, EDF confirmed on Tuesday, without saying whether the incident will delay its restart this winter. The latter was revealed in the press, while a meeting of the local information commission on the site will be held in the afternoon. The group did not give indications about the repair time, nor about a possible postponement of the return to operation of the reactor in question, scheduled for January 8.
It is “too early” to say that the schedule will be changed, said Régis Clément, deputy director of the group’s nuclear production division, during a press conference on the “stress corrosion” phenomenon affecting EDF reactors, including those of Civaux. . The incident that occurred on November 2 has nothing to do with that problem, according to the leader: “it is absolutely not a weld that gave way,” he said.
A leak of 1.5 cubic meters of water per hour
The two reactors at the Vienne plant are the most recent and powerful in the French fleet today, with a capacity of 1.45 GW each. The leak refers to reactor number one, launched in December 1997 and stopped since August 2021. It occurred during a “hydraulic test” aimed at checking the tightness of the “primary circuit” (the one that cools the reactor core) as part of a “regulatory control” carried out “every ten years”, in the absence of nuclear fuel in the tank, said Régis Clément.
A specific device for this test did not withstand the increase in pressure and its rupture, the first of its kind according to EDF, caused a jet of steam, which flooded a room turning into water. The leak is around 1.5 cubic meters per hour and “80 m3 of effluent” have been recovered, according to the head of the group. Now he must engage a robot in the room to recover a metallic element, expelled during the incident and radioactive.
Once the repair is done, “the interrupted requalification test should be resumed,” a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Safety Authority said. Stress corrosion cracking repairs have also been completed at Civaux 1. They are ongoing at Reactor No. 2, which will restart on January 14.
Source: BFM TV
