The French-designed Olkiluoto 3 EPR nuclear reactor, commissioned in April in Finland, was shut down on Sunday evening due to a technical problem, announced its operator, TVO.
“Electricity production at OL3 was interrupted on Sunday evening, November 19, due to a fault detected in the turbine island,” wrote TVO on X, formerly Twitter.
The operator is investigating the causes of this defect, he added, specifying that he did not know when production would resume.
Built by the French group Areva with the German Siemens, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor, on the southwest coast of Finland, entered service in mid-April, after 18 years, i.e. 14 years behind the initial program .
With a power of 1600 megawatts, it is the most powerful nuclear reactor in operation in Europe and provides 14% of Finland’s electricity.
Like many other EPR projects, it was marked by countless delays and enormous additional costs which were one of the main causes of Areva’s industrial dismantling.
The energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine has relaunched nuclear power, with its excellent carbon footprint, as an alternative to fossil fuels, including Russian gas.