A ceremony was held yesterday within the ITER Assembly Hall to mark the official start of the assembly of the tokamak fusion device of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor at Cadarache in south-eastern France. Assembly of the tokamak is expected to take five years to complete.

EDF must ensure the financing and profitability of its proposed EPR2 reactor before starting construction of any plants based on the design in France, the country's state audit office has said. The EPR2 is a simplified version of the EPR design, construction of which has been hit by delays and cost increases in France and Finland.

Indian company Larsen & Toubro Heavy Engineering Ltd has completed the final segment of the ITER cryostat, bringing to an end an eight-year work programme. Work on the cryostat will now continue at the ITER site in southern France where the sections will be assembled, sited and welded over the next four years.
 

EDF is revising upwards its nuclear output estimate in France for 2020, to around 315-325 terawatt-hours. In April, the French state-owned utility said it expected generation this year to be about 300 TWh, down from an initial expectation of 375-390 TWh before the coronavirus outbreak.

A failure to renew France's fleet of nuclear power reactors will have consequences as soon as 2030 for not only the country's energy security but also its climate targets, according to the French nuclear energy society (SFEN). Nuclear power plants, with a combined capacity of 62 GWe, currently account for more than 70% of the country's electricity generation.

French utility EDF yesterday permanently shut down unit 2 of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant in eastern France as scheduled. Its closure, together with that of unit 1 in February, was necessary under the country's energy transition law before EDF can bring new nuclear capacity online.

The dismantling of the Ulysse experimental reactor at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission's Saclay site near Paris has been completed. The low-power reactor, which was shut down in 2007, was mainly operated for teaching and continuing education purposes by the National Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology.

French utility EDF has notified three energy suppliers - Alpiq, Gazel Energie and Total Direct Energie - of the termination of their contracts under a mechanism that allows rival suppliers to buy electricity produced by EDF's nuclear power plants. The suppliers had sought to invoke the force majeure clause in their supply contracts with EDF.

The 1250-tonne steel base of the cryostat - which will insulate the magnetic system at cryogenic temperature from the outside environment - has been installed at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) at Cadarache in south-eastern France. The milestone marks the installation of the first and heaviest component of the ITER fusion machine.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has released the final report from its January 2018 mission to France to review radioactive waste management and decommissioning in the country. The review team said it had been "impressed with the nature and implementation of the French national programme".

Making a commitment to build six new EPRs in France would be an "effective stimulus" for the country's economy as it recovers in the years ahead from the shock of COVID-19, the French nuclear energy society wrote in a position paper published this week. Nuclear energy "ticks all three boxes" highlighted in the debate about the recovery - that investments should be in low-carbon, resilient and sovereign industries, it said.

France's Framatome and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany have started commercial development of nuclear research reactor fuels based on uranium-molybdenum fuel alloys. The fuel can be used instead of highly enriched uranium, which is seen as a potential nuclear proliferation risk.