The chairman and CEO of EDF, Jean-Bernard Lévy, was the guest of “8:30 a.m. franceinfo” on Tuesday February 22, 2022. He answered questions from Lorrain Sénéchal and Neïla Latrous.
The need for “energy independence”
The situation in Ukraine “pleads for the energy independence of Europe”, estimated Jean-Bernard Lévy after Vladimir Putin announced that he recognized the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, two pro-Russian separatist territories in the east of Ukraine. “We cannot have a prosperous Europe if it is not independent in terms of energy. We cannot be weakened because we would depend on the goodwill of this or that on whether or not he supplies us in this or that energy or raw material”, hammered the CEO of EDF. However, he assures us that, with regard to EDF’s activity, Russia “is not an economically important partner” and that their exchanges will continue to “weak” level.
For him, the tensions in Eastern Europe have “already” had consequences “Since gas prices have risen a lot since last summer and observers believe that one of the reasons the price of gas has gone up is the geopolitical tensions between Ukraine, Russia, and the fact that Russia has not recently exported all the gas it could export, it has limited itself to honoring its own contracts at a minimum”.
Flamanville EPR: horizon 2023
“We have planned the loading of Flamanville 3 in the second quarter of 2023”assures Jean-Bernard Lévy while the construction site of the EPR is more than ten years late and its cost – 3.3 billion euros at the start – has been multiplied by at least five. “Before the middle of next year we plan to have the authorization of the Nuclear Safety Authority so that the nuclear fuel which is already on site, we transport it from the pool to the reactor vessel and then, a few weeks later, make it work. We are in line with what we announced a few months ago”, he promises.
“The delay is very substantialrecognizes the CEO, but you also have to see that we hadn’t built for a very long time and restarting construction was not easy, we readily admit that.”
“Unexpected” corrosion problems
The CEO of EDF explained that the corrosion problems identified in six nuclear power plants, shut down, “are things that we did not know how to detect when it was built”. “Today, we know how to detect them because we have ultrasound scanners – a bit like those that look at the human body – much finer than they were at the time and so we realized that there were things that were unexplained and that’s why we stopped a few reactors”, he says. These problems, “unexpected”are “in some places where we shouldn’t see this corrosion at all, so we stopped them to examine them, to fully understand what’s going on”.