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26 of France’s 56 Nuclear Reactors are Offline for Pipe Corrosion or Maintenance

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32 comments on 26 of France’s 56 Nuclear Reactors are Offline for Pipe Corrosion or Maintenance

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Nuclear reactor image from WSJ Tweet below

Pipe corrosion, maintenance, and labor unrest have nearly half of French nuclear reactors offline. 

The result is France’s Worst Energy Crisis Since the 1970s.

Twenty-six of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline for maintenance or because of corrosion on piping that cools the reactor cores. Fixing the corrosion is taking longer than expected at several reactors, delaying their restart by as much as six weeks, according to regulatory filings and a French nuclear executive familiar with the matter.

Labor unrest is another obstacle. Strikes at 18 reactors owned by EDF SA, France’s state-controlled power giant, have delayed their restart by several weeks, threatening the government’s plans to have all of them back online by the end of the winter. EDF and union leaders said they reached an agreement Friday on salary increases, ending the strikes.

EDF, the world’s largest owner of nuclear plants, is one of Western Europe’s most important power companies. Its fleet of reactors normally exports large quantities of low-cost nuclear power to neighboring countries, helping stabilize prices across the region.

The situation changed drastically this year, when France swung from being one of Europe’s largest exporters of electricity to a net importer because of the outages at its reactors. The rash of outages has officials worried that France and the broader region might run short of electricity in the winter, when power demand in Europe peaks.

The outages have forced EDF to absorb huge losses because the company was forced to buy replacement power on Europe’s wholesale market, where prices have soared, for sale to retail clients at much lower prices.

Labor Unions Call for General Strike

Protests in France, Italy Holland

Irritated Farmers Dump Merde

Protests in France, Serbia, Germany, Italy, and Spain

Check Out This Line of People in France

https://twitter.com/Ukraine66251776/status/1582583176248950784

140,000 people took part in the France protest. There were calls for France to withdraw from NATO. Leftists and trade unions organized protests against soaring living costs, inflation EU NATO 

Just a Prelude

If those reactors don’t come back on line in time, and that’s a good bet, things are going to get really messy in Europe. 

This post originated at MishTalk.Com.

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32 Comments
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Hansa Junchun
Hansa Junchun
3 years ago
Russia has several floating muclear reactors. I’m sure they could float on over and help out a bit if…, y-you know… someone got on their knees & said “pretty please?”
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Billy
Billy
3 years ago
Governments are failing at providing the basics to the citizens.
Education is now teaching about false genders instead of subjects in school.
California is failing at improving the supply of water.
Many states are failing at enforcing laws and protecting citizens from crime.
It seems that having leaders who don’t put their citizens first is just making everything worse.
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
3 years ago
Reply to  Billy
“Governments are failing at providing the basics to the citizens.”
Duh!
Governments, even in the US, are the ones with the most and biggest guns. Not citizens. Hence: There will never, ever be a case of government providing for citizens. But rather about citizens providing for government. After all, the guy without the gun, will always be the one who ends up providing for the guy with the gun. Human relations don’t get more basic than that.
Instead, what has changed, is that citizens are now forced to provide so much to government, that they are no longer able to provide even the basics for themselves. Back in more civilised eras, citizens still had to provide some for government. But back then, government was smaller and more limited. Hence more limited in what it could force citizens to provide to it. Now that government is larger, more militarised hence asymmetrically armed, and less limited; citizens are forced to provide more. To the point where they can no longer afford to retain even the basics for themselves, once ever increasing indenture and usury payments have been taken from them.
This is why citizens are no longer provided the basics. Not some weird, illogical, inversion fantasy; where “governments”, of all ridiculous things, ever “provided” for anyone more than they took in return.
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Webej
Webej
3 years ago
50% of the NPP fleet down for corrosion & maintenance, exactly co-inciding with historic fuel shortages and electricity prices.
It almost seems like it was planned. Why is this happening at the worst possible moment?
As for the unrest: People are being told to do with less fuel, heat, food, fertilizer, and purchasing power.
Why would they be unsatisfied?
Is it the personality of the leaders? Or their looks? Or the PR?
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Dutoit
Dutoit
3 years ago
Reply to  Webej
I am very sad to say that the majority of these unsatisfied people deserve what happen to them. They have elected, one after the other, these “leaders” who are destroying their country.
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RonJ
RonJ
3 years ago
“Labor Unions Call for General Strike
Protests in France, Italy Holland
Protests in… Serbia, Germany, Italy, and Spain”
Look at all the happy people
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spa sidechats
spa sidechats
3 years ago
Why would anyone schedule major maintenance on their home furnace when winter starts? Who does that? Maybe they could not afford to run it during winter so it really didn’t matter. Or, perhaps it just broke at the wrong time (along with 26 of 56 other neighbors in the subdivision).
As for this circumstance, France’s nuclear plants have always operated in the red from what I have read due to price controls. If they removed the price controls and went with market value nobody could afford it enough to matter. Pretty sure a lot more is going on than just maintenance here.
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KidHorn
KidHorn
3 years ago
Reply to  spa sidechats
I’m not an expert, but there are generally 2 times a year there’s a lot of electricity demand. Summer and Winter. So it would sense to take them offline in either the spring or fall.
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spa sidechats
spa sidechats
3 years ago
Reply to  KidHorn
Some are pointing this out. Really need a SME to explain if this is SOP or something else. News about social unrest, energy concerns in the eurozone is not being covered much by legacy media. Sensational header could be a nothingburger which is par for the course these days.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  spa sidechats
In normal time one-third of the reactors are down for normal maintenance. When covid came they put off much of the normal maintenance expecting to make up for it after the pandemic then Putin invaded Ukraine. Nuclear gave France the cheapest and most reliable electricity in Europe and made profits in spite of having to sell a quarter of its electricity for cost or under cost. The government issued bonds to build the park of reactors and did not subvention its operations so it did not operate in the red except for the occasional write-off.
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PapaDave
PapaDave
3 years ago
Reply to  spa sidechats
Maintenance and repair issues have been well known in France for over a year, but are they massively behind schedule due to a lack of skilled workers, lack of parts, and bureaucratic bungling. Then there are low river levels which have forced some facilities to cut back because they can’t get enough water to cool their reactors.
Just another example of how poorly the world is handling the energy transition.
Which simply increases demand for oil and gas. Yet the oil and gas industry has not been investing enough for the last decade, because they expected demand for their product to slowly decline. Surprise! The good news is that the oil and gas industry is gushing cash flow as a result of the resulting high prices.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  PapaDave
Low water has been over for a month now because it’s been raining. Additionally the low water problem was for ecological reasons and not for the actual operation of the reactors. What the government did was just get a temporary derogation and too bad for the river fishes and snails.
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Dutoit
Dutoit
3 years ago
The problems with reactors in France come from the difficult financial situation of EDF, which comes uniquely from the requirement to obey the European laws. First EDF had to be split, a separate company, ENEDIS, was created to manage only the distribution of electricity. EDF kept only the production. Then EDF had to sell a big part of its production, at a very low price, to parasites whose only task is to sell electricity, and producing nothing. The final spot is the project to privatize dams, so that EDF stopped its activity in construction (it could increase the production of electricity with dams by 25%).
The only solution is that EDF obeys only the national laws, ignore everything else.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  Dutoit
The laws the EU made to “free” the electricity market from national energy monopolies singled out EDF and forced it to sell electricity to competitors at artificially low prices really hurt EDF unnecessarily especially since many of these competitors were just boutiques set up take advantage of those stupid laws and had little production capacity themselves. They were just arbitrating between the spot rate and the subsidized rate. Another EU stupidity was to tie the price of electricity in Europe to the price of natural gas for some reason that has absolutely no economic reason to do so. EDF’s major shareholder, the French government, never did anything to change that because since Sarkozy the ecologist side of French politics decided France’s energy policy and they wanted EDF to die slowly.
Another real travesty was that in December the government ordered EDF to sell even more electricity way below market price to these parasite companies to bail them out because having little production they couldn’t furnish any electricity to their clients. It was a direct transfer of over 20 billion Euro from EDF to them. It caused EDF’s stock price to half in a few days and caused the government to launch a takeover of the company at an extremely low giveaway price thus royally screwing the public shareholders in a way I have never seen in my life.
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
“these competitors were just boutiques set up take advantage of those stupid laws and had little production capacity themselves. They were just arbitrating between the spot rate and the subsidised rate.”
Yet another example of the, by now, near 100% pervasive: Taking from the competent, in order to hand the loot to connected dilettantes.
Connected dilettante, just to clarify for those less than 5 years old (mentally…. ), is a pre-Newspeak term for the useless rabble who are wasting oxygen performing net-negative make-work in so called “finance”, “trading”, “investing”, “hedging”, “markets” etc…. Who produces, literally, less than nothing. Of any value. Yet are these days to be enriched by the junta and its money printers and, even worse, listened to. About anything whatsoever.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  StukiMoi
Businesses in general are not parasitic but sometimes a company can be so parasitic that it takes your breath away and they are almost always boutiques who are well-connected and well-protected.
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MarkraD
MarkraD
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
In America, I dunno, large corporations utilizing their buying power over congress/senate/executive/SCOTUS with campaign bucks ain’t so great either.
Comcast, ATT spending millions to deny net neutrality to decide what sites we can get on at what price while gouging customers, banks overturning Glass Steagall – Sub prime crisis, Pharma pressing for self regulation – opioid crisis that killed millions.
The SCOTUS tells us money isn’t bribery, it’s “free speech”, that’s not what the Constitution says.
.
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
Businesses are as parasitic as they can get away with being. It’s impossible for a non-parasite to compete against a competitor who is given carte-blanche to lose money indefinitely; with the junta promising to make up for the losses by debasing whatever earnings the non-parasite is able to generate.
As for “boutiques”; they have never been anything but Newspeak for the incompetent dilettante children; of connected parents who are using their closeness to the totalitarian state to effect wealth transfers: From more competent but less connected others. To their play-office, useless waste of space offspring.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago

First of all
the repair work on the reactors is a bit slower than expected by six weeks but they
will progressively come back online. That is a technical problem that is easily
manageable. The other problem is with some unions that are striking for more
money. There are four unions involved (CGT, FO, CFDT and the CFE-CGC) and the new contract terms have already been negotiated with the final
acceptance by vote of the members slated for the 27th of this month.
By the way those who work for EDF pay pennies (really only pennies) for their
electricity and always have. The risk of a strike is probably pretty small at
this point but nevertheless could happen. Of the four unions the CGT and the FO
are the real hardcore ones. CGT is mainline communist and FO is the Trotskyist
variation. We have a strike in some refineries now and although most workers
are working there we have a small group of CGT in key specialties keeping the
refineries from pumping. That is their trademark. Coming back to the problem
the reactors are coming back online and the threat of strikes diminishing heading
into winter. Generally, Europe has reacted quickly to cut Russian sources and
find new suppliers although at a cost. Going forward those energy cost should
abate next year since Europe is building new installations for LNG, more
pumping from the fields within the continent, more renewables and increased oil
and gas availability from around the world. The new energy mix will entail new
costs but this is not the first time that this has happened. You adjust and
move on.

I had to
laugh when I saw the twitter accounts Mish put on the blog about the protests.
One, Apocalypsos has a big Russia Z on its logo and another UnkraineNews has
the hammer and cycle sign in its logo. That leads me to believe that these two
twitter accounts are not exactly reliable news sources. In France demonstrations
are in the culture and nothing exceptional. These two twitter accounts want to
give the impression that this is a “Gilet Jeune” type movement but it isn’t. Many
in Russia and elsewhere are hoping that winter will save Russia from its folly.
It won’t. Europe is off Russian energy forever now.

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TexasTim65
TexasTim65
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
> Europe is off Russian energy forever now.
Never is a long time. I bet no one in England or France ever imagined doing business with Germany after WWII and things were orders of magnitude worse between those countries at the end of WWII and yet quite soon after there was plenty of business being done and now the those countries have been best buddies for decades.
As soon as the war ends and Russian gas is cheaper than someone else’s gas, Europe will buy that gas from Russia. It’s just sound economic common sense.
What won’t happen is allowing Russia to be a single supplier.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
Once bitten twice shy about buying Russian oil and gas over a very small amount and none at all as long as Putin and his people are there. If Russia is de-nazified like Germany was then a certain amount could be accepted back but it has to be de-nazified first.
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TexasTim65
TexasTim65
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
What does de-nazified mean? Isn’t Russia trying to de-nazify Ukraine?
Russia was communist, and now it is somewhere between communist and benevolent dictatorship in the same way China is. It was never nazi.
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MarkraD
MarkraD
3 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
There are no “Nazi’s” in Ukraine, that statement has become a joke, Zelensky is 100% Jewish, with ancestors who diedin the Holocaust.
Russia has gone from Communism to the opposite, a quasi-Fascist government of plutocrats, where private industry, corporations interact closely in government decision making, the wealthiest have control of means of production.
.
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Doug78
Doug78
3 years ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
Putin’s Russia has developed too many Nazi-like characteristics to ignore. They were once communist but there are similitudes between communism and nazis in that they both use the same methods and have the same goals. Garry Kasparov accurately characterizes Putin’s Russia as the offspring of a marriage between both systems and he is right. That’s why none of Russia’s neighbors want to be ruled by them. They are too creepy.
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MarkraD
MarkraD
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
True, new supply chains and producers are in place, Putin overplayed his hand and the ramifications are long term.
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StukiMoi
StukiMoi
3 years ago
Reply to  Doug78
“Europe is off Russian energy forever now.”
“Energy” is far too large a share of economies, for being “off” the far-and-away lowest cost supplier to be viable for long.
Hysteria and/or panic over yesterdays’ arrangements not turning out to be quite as one-sided rosy as the most gullible once envisioned; can suspend economic realities as motivator for action for awhile. But once the initial bout of hissyfit subsides; “we’ll” still buy solar panels (and everything else) from China. And employ seasonal labor from Mexico, and other lower cost providers. And oil and gas and lithium from places where Dear Leader on occasion tweets mean things about those cute LGBTEJSWHONGSTJFWWPIYNCXESFGFD people “we” like to post selfies of petting.
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Felix_Mish
Felix_Mish
3 years ago
A graph at Wikipedia seems to indicate that France’s nuke output was around the same from 2000 to the end of the graph at 2020. That said, apparently they’ve had other issues in the past, as would be expected of any complex system.
Another graph indicates that their most common reactor age hit 40 in 2022. Maybe that’s a reason why there’s a current wave of repair and update.
which has this delightful passage buried in a lot of hard info:
Early in 2003 France’s first national energy debate was announced, in
response to a “strong demand from the French people”, 70% of whom had
identified themselves as being poorly informed on energy questions. A
poll had shown that 67% of people thought that environmental protection
was the single most important energy policy goal. (However, 58% thought
that nuclear power caused climate change while only 46% thought that
coal burning did so).
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Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
3 years ago
Reply to  Felix_Mish
“However, 58% thought that nuclear power caused climate change while only 46% thought that coal burning did so.”
Another study in sociology right there.
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Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
3 years ago
The French put up with the bloody propaganda BS, and asked themself what’s in this imperial loot for them?
And the aswer was – nothing.
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TheCaptain
TheCaptain
3 years ago
Look around the world. Everyone is rioting and protesting and each of them thinks their little issue is root cause. But the real problem is that fiat currency is fake money and the US has been running a Global Debt Ponzi (GDP) for 50+ years using fiat currency as the energy source. But no Ponzi ever lasted forever and CPIflation is what is going to end it this time one way or the other.
All of these people need to go home, look in a mirror, and punch themselves in the face because ALL of this is happening because stupid gullible fools accepted fake Mammon Money as if it were real. We the people did this to ourselves. When someone honest like Ron Paul would state the truth, many people would mock his voice or his ill fitting suits because the Ponzi had not yet blown up in our faces. But now that it is too late, they are sorry things got this way.
Too late!! The piper will now be paid either by a deflationary crash that will make 29-32 look like fun OR by global massive inflation and even hyperinflation.
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PapaDave
PapaDave
3 years ago
Reply to  TheCaptain
So how are you positioning your investments for this catastrophe?
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Too much BS
Too much BS
3 years ago
The French Want Their Money Back From Zelensky !
We’ve all been had by US/NATO Alliance.
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