Les cahiers de l'ASN #01 - Nuclear power plants: going beyond 40 years

? ... ? ... There are no regulations setting the lifetime of the French NPPs . However, each periodic safety review is an opportunity to define the conditions in which continued operation for a maximum of 10 years would be possible. At present, EDF envisages extending the lifetime of certain NPPs up to 60 years: if this were to be the case, this would require the performance of a 50-year periodic safety review, with modifications designed to guarantee and raise their level of safety. The ten-yearly outage inspection is simply one of the steps in the periodic safety review. ASN’s opinion on the generic phase of the periodic safety review, scheduled for the end of 2020, will be issued well before its position statement on the continued operation of Tricastin reactor 1, scheduled for 2022. The ten-yearly outage inspection for Tricastin 1 will begin in 2019, in other words before ASN has issued its overall opinion. Is this not a contradiction? Could our NPPs operate for up to 60 or 80 years? * See glossary p.24 4th periodic safety review of the French 900 MWe nuclear power reactors • 23