EDF and Areva... and taxpayers

[Enthalpy]

Hello everybody...

 

This story will be fabulously, incredibly, horribly expensive for sure. Whether it kills EDF, the French near-monopoly electricity producer, and puts France in a Greek situation, will be seen in a few years.

 

Context: in the 70's, EDF is the state-owned monopoly electricity producer and distributor. The government orders to build nuclear powerplants everywhere. Besides the dependence on Africa for uranium and besides a few core melts, France gets electricity.

 

These reactors are 40 years old, some should have long been replaced, but Areva can't develop the EPR reactor, so nothing is done. The EPR building sites abroad will cost delay penalties exceeding much the sale price: a commercial company would be long closed, but the French governement injects taxpayer's money, orders one more EPR for France and "sells" two to Britain (that is, EDF buys and operates), and lets EDF "buy" the reactor activity from Areva for several G€ despite it won't ever make any profit.

 

Meanwhile: Keep the old reactors and hope they don't burst soon.

 

EDF is already overloaded by a huge debt, possibly 70G€. It has no sufficient provision to build new nuclear reactors (200G€? At Hinckley Point's price it's rather 500G€!). It has no money to decommission the old reactors, and has never taken one apart and cleaned the site. It doesn't plan to pay the storage of radioactive waste - taxpayer's money directly of course. Even the upgrades to operate the old reactors 10 years more is to cost possibly 50G€.

 

In front of this obvious nonsense, all successive governments have done the same: nothing. They injected a few G€ here and there so the problem appears after they leave office but worse. No reasonable sales price for the electricity ("cheapest in Europe" but EDF sinks under its debt, and anyway the gross price is cheaper elsewhere). Recently, the Gov even perceived a dividend from EDF.

 

EDF builds two 1.6GW EPR at Hinckley Point for 18G£/pair or, at mean 2*1.3GW: 8.2€/W. In the 90's, one 1.3GW nuclear powerplant cost like 0.3G€, now it's almost *100!

 

Just to compare, Dong Energy bought 300x 6MW wind turbines to Siemens for 2.5G€

http://www.siemens.co.uk/en/news_press/index/news_archive/siemens-to-supply-300-wind-turbines-to-dong-energy.htm

and since offshore the mean load is 1/3, the acquisition cost 4.2€/W.

 

That is, just the recent injection of 9G€ of taxpayer's money into Areva and EDF

http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/actualites/1/actualite-economique/nucleaire-l-etat-actionnaire-a-la-manoeuvre-pour-soutenir-la-filiere_1867961.html

would have bought wind turbines equivalent to 2.1GW, more than the unfinished EPR at Flamanville. And the 18G£ for Hinckley Point would have bought wind turbines equivalent to 5.1GW: as much as 4 EPR rather than 2 planned there.

 

The price per MWh is also cheaper for wind energy than for Hinckley Point's EPR.

 

What's next?

 

If some French government takes action and lets build nuclear reactors of foreign technology, it may cost 200G€ over the coming 10 years. Whether the consumer or the taxpayer is shorn, this money won't be available for other expenses, so the country will be poorer. If this is done 10 years later, it will cost 50G€ more to maintain the old reactors in activity. Add waste storage and decommissioning to this.

 

Replacing by non-nukes looks unthinkable in France.

 

But the most probable future is that every government will do exactly what the previous ones did: nothing. Until one plant has a catastrophic accident, or until EDF is bankrupt - which may happen sooner than expected, and add >10% GDP of new public debt, putting France at once in the near-junk category at the side of Italy.