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progree

(11,463 posts)
2. World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021 (WNISR 2021) - a gloomy view of the French nuclear
Mon Jun 20, 2022, 06:32 AM
Jun 2022

Last edited Mon Jun 20, 2022, 01:15 PM - Edit history (3)

program

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2021-773.html

Unfortunately the full report is a big PDF
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2021-lr.pdf
The France Focus begins on page 82.

The report came out in September 2021, so is 9 months old.

As an example, here is how it starts:

The year 2020 was particularly difficult for the French nuclear sector. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the industry not only by reducing electricity consumption and increasing costs, but the operation of nuclear power plants was significantly impacted by the repeated reshuffling of the outage schedules. Output plunged to the lowest level in 27 years. While no reactor has been shut down explicitly due to the impact of COVID-19, nuclear power has turned out very sensitive to effects, like the need to have very large numbers of workers on-site during refueling and maintenance outages.

The credit-rating agencies did not wait for year-end and in June 2020 downgraded EDF to BBB+ (lower medium grade) notably because of “lower-than-expected availability of nuclear reactors”. However, due to the “likelihood of government support”, EDF is awarded three notches over its “Stand Alone Credit Profile”, which is now lowered BB+ (non-investment grade or “junk”). EDF’s U.K. subsidiary EDF Energy was downgraded to “junk”.159

“Without civil nuclear no military nuclear, without military nuclear no civil nuclear.” -President Emmanuel Macron

At the end of 2020, President Emmanuel Macron visited the Creusot Forge that had been fighting for several years with a scandalous history of irregularities and falsifications in the documentation of thousands of forged pieces spanning over several decades (see Nuclear Power and Criminal Energy (( < -- a link to an interesting-sounding chapter that begins on page 218 --Progree )) )...
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