Olkiluoto faces further delay to July 2020

The consortium had announced in the spring of this year that it would update the schedule for completing the project because "modification work" was not progressing as expected, TVO said.

Nuclear fuel will now be loaded into the reactor in January 2020, the first connection to the grid will take place in April 2020, and the start of regular electricity production will take place in July 2020, TVO said. Regular electricity production was previously planned to start in January 2020, it added.

"The re-baseline is now more exhaustive which we believe will make it possible to improve project performance," Jouni Silvennoinen, TVO's director of the OL3 EPR project, said. "The scheduling work was not only a schedule updating exercise, but it consisted of methodology to change the ways of working. Although completion of the plant unit will be further delayed, we are currently working to reach the fuel loading phase and to take over the OL3 EPR unit," he added.

OL3 plant supplier consortium - AREVA GmbH, AREVA NP SAS and Siemens AG - is constructing the unit under a fixed-price turnkey contract. They have joint liability for the contractual obligations until the end of the guarantee period of the unit.