ASN’s New Year’s greetings to the press for 2024: at a time of transition for the fleet of nuclear facilities and nuclear activities, ASN underlines the points requiring particular attention with regard to nuclear safety and radiation protection

On 30 January, the ASN Commission and Director General’s office presented their New Year’s greetings to the press.

Bernard Doroszczuk, ASN Chairman, underlined that in 2023, nuclear safety and radiation protection had been maintained at a satisfactory level.

For the reactor fleet, 2023 saw EDF implement a strategy – which was considered by ASN to be appropriate – to deal with and treat the stress corrosion phenomenon that had appeared on some of its reactors at the end of 2021. For the fuel cycle facilities, there were fewer problems in 2023 than in 2022.

With regard to radiation protection, performance remained at a high level, despite a rise in level 2 significant radiotherapy events in the medical sector.

At a time of new perspectives for the fleet of nuclear facilities and nuclear activities, the ASN Chairman highlighted three points requiring particular attention in the future:

The most ambitious perspectives on the part of the licensees, for the continued operation of the existing nuclear facilities, demand that the measures to be adopted in order to achieve these new objectives safely be identified.

This requirement concerns both the power reactors, for operation up to 60 years, and the fuel cycle facilities for operation up to or indeed beyond the 2040 time-frame set by the Multi-year Energy Plan (PPE). This means that the licensees must define the conditions in which they can make the facilities in service more robust and more resilient to hazards and to ageing.

The enthusiasm for the new reactors (SMR / AMR) which have potentially promising intrinsic safety features, should not eclipse the technical and societal issues that they raise.

These issues are notably linked to the preliminary work to be done to demonstrate their operational safety, based on research work or the construction of prototypes, to all the safety/security and non-proliferation issues to be considered upstream of the projects and, finally, to the acceptability of the siting of these reactors outside dedicated nuclear sites, in order to contribute to the decarbonisation of the existing industrial sites.

The numerous nuclear projects being envisaged require an exceptional effort in terms of expertise, project management and industrial rigour, which impacts the entire sector.

Despite the progress made in technical management and oversight of activities, the inspections conducted by ASN along the procurement chain for the equipment intended for nuclear facilities is still bringing to light recurring shortfalls in industrial rigour. These shortfalls, which must be corrected, mainly concern the suppliers’ insufficient knowledge of the specified requirements important for safety, the lack of expertise in certain special processes, along with a lack of rigour and performance in monitoring of the supply chain.

Over and above these shortfalls, against the backdrop of a significant increase in workload and in the light of the situation observed in recent years, combatting falsification and counterfeiting at all levels along the subcontracting chain must remain a major point for particular attention across the sector.