"Counting the cost of cracking"
https://neimagazine.com/features/featurecounting-the-cost-of...
"Corrosion Problem Shutters Half of France’s Nuclear Reactors"
https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...
"Regulator approves EDF's plan for checking corrosion issues"
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Regulator-approv...
[1] https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurefeedback-on-the-...
Checking the article, I see I indeed read over "Corrosion at a clutch of reactors". That sentence didn't really parse in my head until reading it for the third time: clutch is a quantity, didn't see that use before. Guess I was captivated by the unrelated graphic above and then glanced over this part without noticing that I had missed precisely the information for which I opened the article!
Deferred maintenance during Covid and unexpected corrosion issues. The too hot water is just the summer cherry on top.
They were already announcing planned reductions (for maintenance) back in winter 2022 (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-group-edf-cuts...)
I believe additional issues have popped up since then causing EDF to plan additional maintenance shutdowns.
1. As you said, the water issue is just temporary. This is a non-issue for this winter. 2. The next generation NPP, the EPR, is late and is currently only planned for 2023 3. The current NPPs have been authorised to be used up to 50 years, under the condition of doing fairly important upgrades. This is what is ongoing. And because the decision to push these to 50 years was late, the upgrade schedule is quite tight. 4. This upgrade, and other normal maintenance have been impacted by COVID 5. As someone else said, corrosion was discovered during the maintenance of an NPP. Since the cause of the corrosion could not be explained, the operator decided to shut down all the NPPs with the same design. This is being currently analysed and it looks like the nuclear authority is happy with the proposal. The current work is to develop a reliable system to detect and monitor this corrosion, not a change in the design 6. The main operator is in the process of being fully nationalised and is suffering financially as it was basically asked to bail out its competitors this year due to the energy crisis. 7. The backup to NPPs in France is currently gas. And you may be aware of a small constraint on gas due to some issues with a country located further East. If Russia stops the delivery completely, gas supply could be an issue and therefore we need to plan to reopen coal plants that were closed because they were no longer useful.