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(Bloomberg) — Electricite de France SA will repair cracked pipes at its Civaux 1 nuclear reactor during a scheduled maintenance halt next year, avoiding an unplanned outage.
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Two tiny cracks that pose no risk to plant safety were detected in October, the company said Wednesday. The utility has installed equipment to prevent them becoming more severe and will replace the affected parts during a planned shutdown that starts in March 2027.
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The decision on timing — approved by France’s nuclear safety authority — may ease concerns about any impact on output. Europe’s power market is sensitive to unscheduled stoppages in the country’s vast atomic fleet, after EDF had to undertake lengthy emergency repairs in 2022 in 2023, just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a regionwide energy crisis.
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France’s nuclear production has since rebounded, underpinning record electricity exports the past two years amid subdued domestic demand.
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Since 2023, EDF has checked for so-called stress corrosion during planned reactor halts, and has “industrialized” its repair processes, the company said Wednesday. Most of the time, such repairs have little or no impact on the duration of the maintenance shutdown, it said.
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EDF has fixed more than 80 “significant” pipe cracks in the past four years and now has the situation “under control,” according to Olivier Dubois, a commissioner at the safety authority. The utility has also installed “collars” near the welds that are most sensitive to stress corrosion, which should help to protect them, he said Tuesday.
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The authority’s chairman, Pierre-Marie Abadie, said it’s not an issue that will go away, with the corrosion “part of the life of facilities.” But EDF “will make proposals on its day-to-day monitoring policy, and implement measures that allow it to limit stress corrosion,” he said.
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