Creys-Malville nuclear power plant

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Creys-Malville nuclear power plant
Creys-Malville nuclear power plant
Creys-Malville nuclear power plant
location
Creys-Malville nuclear power plant (France)
Creys-Malville nuclear power plant
Coordinates 45 ° 45 ′ 30 "  N , 5 ° 28 ′ 20"  E Coordinates: 45 ° 45 ′ 30 "  N , 5 ° 28 ′ 20"  E
Country: France
Data
Owner: Electricity de France
Operator: Electricity de France
Project start: 1976
Shutdown: Dec 31, 1998

Decommissioned reactors (gross):

1 (1242 MW)
Energy fed in since commissioning: 3,392 GWh
Was standing: July 27, 2007
The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .
f1
Model of the containment
Creys-Malville nuclear power plant in 1984

The French nuclear power plant Creys-Malville , also Superphénix , is located on the Rhone near the small town of Malville within the municipality of Creys-Mépieu in the Isère department . It is a sodium-cooled fast breeder that has not produced electricity since 1996, was finally shut down in 1997 and is to be Template: future / in 5 yearsdismantled by 2027 .

construction

Superphénix was a further development of the predecessor plant Phénix nuclear power plant , which had been in operation since 1973. Dre construction of Superphénix began in 1974. Commissioning and start of power generation did not take place until 1985. The total costs increased enormously during the construction phase.

The power plant was operated by NERSA , an international public company. Its shareholders were EDF (51%), the Italian energy supplier Enel (33%) and the German Schneller Brüter Kernkraftwerksgesellschaft mbH "SBK" (16%). The latter was in turn a consortium of energy suppliers RWE from Germany, SEP from the Netherlands, and Electrabel from Belgium. NERSA was dissolved in 2000. EDF became the sole owner.

There were considerable protests during the construction phase. A protest march of 60,000 people was forcibly broken up in 1977 by the CRS riot police . One of the demonstrators, Vital Michalon , was killed by a stun grenade used by the CRS, and hundreds were injured, some seriously.

business

The electrical output of the reactor was originally supposed to be 1,200  megawatts (MW) . The experimental setup of the reactor caused the operator to be extremely careful, so that this value could not be achieved during the entire operating time. Over time, other problems emerged: the liquid sodium cooling system suffered from corrosion and leaks .

  • In 1984 the reactor was filled with sodium.
  • In 1985 it was loaded with fuel.
  • After coupling (synchronization) to the electricity network on January 15, 1986, the power plant generated electricity.
  • First incident: On March 8, 1987, a leak occurred in the so-called barillet (a cylindrical container inside the reactor in which the radioactivity of used fuel assemblies is allowed to subside for some time before they are transported outside or inside). Using the wrong grade of steel cracked welded areas, causing 20 tons of sodium to leak, a class 2 occurrence on the French event scale. Since the entire fuel element pool was filled with liquid sodium anyway, there was no consequential damage, but a long standstill. On May 26, 1987 the then Minister of Industry Alain Madelin decided to shut down the reactor. The restart of the reactor was permitted on January 12, 1989 by decree by Prime Minister Michel Rocard . However, it remained switched off until September 7, 1989.
  • April 29, 1990: Another class 2 incident. A sodium leak in one of the four primary circuits forced the circuit, which was filled with 400 tons of Na, to be emptied immediately. The sodium in the reactor must under all circumstances be protected from contamination so that no oxides or metal particles can clog the cooling circuit. The cleaning required for this took eight months.
  • On December 8, 1990, part of the roof of the turbine hall collapsed under the load of 80 cm of snow. It became necessary to rebuild half of the building's supporting structure. In 1992 electricity production could be resumed.
  • In 1994 there was an internal argon release in the power plant (argon serves as a protective gas for the sodium in the reactor vessel). Thereafter, the permitted performance was initially reduced to 30 percent in 1995. From 1996 it was 60 percent, but only for a few months until an emergency shutdown shut down the reactor again.

Superphénix turned out to be not as successful as its smaller predecessor Phénix . At the start of construction, the experience gained with the Phénix was still limited, and the five times higher performance of the Superphénix created unexpected difficulties.

Protests against construction and operation

Creys-Malville has been a focal point for many opponents of nuclear power, such as the French Green Party , since it was planned and during the years of construction .

During a demonstration with 60,000 participants on July 31, 1977, there were considerable riots in which Vital Michalon was killed. In 1989 dozens of associations and organizations from France, Switzerland and Italy came together to form the "Comité européen contre Superphénix". On April 26th, rallies were organized in several cities in France, Switzerland and Italy under the motto "Tchernobyl four years ago, Malville today".

Missile attack

The ongoing protests and attempts at sabotage reached their climax on the night of January 18, 1982. A group of militant opponents of nuclear power fired at the unfinished power plant with five projectiles from a portable rocket launcher of the Soviet type RPG-7 . Two of the rockets missed the reactor , which was not yet equipped with radioactive material at the time, and damaged the building slightly, which, according to the manufacturer, did not lead to construction delays.

On May 8, 2003, Chaim Nissim , a member of the Swiss Green Party , admitted to carrying out the attack. The group around Nissim tried to get weapons through the terrorist Carlos and finally got them from the left-wing Belgian terrorist organization Cellules Communistes Combattantes .

In 1997, the national network Sortir du nucléaire (German nuclear phase-out ) was founded from an amalgamation of 758 groups of opponents of nuclear power - in connection with the struggle of the conservationists against Superphénix to shut it down.

Closure and dismantling

In December 1996 the breeder was shut down for maintenance work. A judicial process initiated by the opponents of the power plant before the Conseil d'État came to the conclusion that an order from 1994, which had allowed operations to resume, was invalid.

At the beginning of 1997, work began to transform “the plutonium production machine into a plutonium annihilator, which would cost billions more”.

In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power station as one of his first acts. He justified this step with the enormous costs that the power plant caused. In the previous decade, it had failed to produce electricity for most of the time due to malfunction. In fact, it used significant amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. (Every pipeline carrying sodium and every tank was provided with heating and thermal insulation for this purpose)

Creys-Malville was the penultimate nuclear power plant in Western Europe that generated electricity with a breeder reactor. The last one, the Phénix (130 MW net), was officially shut down on February 1, 2010 . Only Russia continued to use breeder reactors at this time.

According to a 1996 report by the French Court of Auditors, the Cour des Comptes , the costs for the power station amounted to the equivalent of 9.1 billion euros. The last of the 650 fuel rods were removed on March 18, 2003. The complete dismantling of the power plant began in 2006.

Similar to the closure of the fast breeder at the Dounreay nuclear power plant in Great Britain , a system was built that converts the 5,520 tonnes of sodium from the former cooling system into sodium hydroxide solution, which is then cast with cement to form 38,000 concrete blocks. These remain as approx. 70,000 tons of only slightly radioactive and water-insoluble material for final disposal. However Template: future / in 5 years, they will remain in safe custody near the dismantling site together with 14 tons of plutonium until the end date of the dismantling in around 2027 . In 2014, EDF was convicted by a court of having taken too few measures against a possible emergency on the construction site, which at times has several hundred workers. The dismantling of the reactor circuit is currently (2017) in progress, and from around 2020 the reactor building is to be demolished over several years.

Data of the reactor blocks

The Creys-Malville nuclear power plant - the most powerful fast breeder ever built - has a total of one block :

Reactor block Reactor type net
power 		gross
power 		start of building Network
synchronization 		Commercialization
of essential operation 		switching off
processing
Superphénix Breeder 1200 MW 1242 MW December 13, 1976 01/15/1986 December 01, 1986 December 31, 1998

See also

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  1. ↑ Décret no 2000-980 du 6 octobre 2000 authorizing the dissolution de la société anonyme dénommée Centrale nucléaire européenne à neutrons rapides SA (NERSA)
  2. ↑ Superphénix, l'expérimentation nucléaire en question , par Raymond Avrillier , publié dans Stratégies Energétiques, Biosphère & Société (SEBES), en November 1990
  3. ^ Report parlementaire sur Superphénix et la filière des réacteurs à neutrons rapides , par Christian Bataille , le 25 June 1998
  4. ↑ R. Sené: Rapport Superphénix à l'assemblée national , 1998; historical appendix
  5. ↑ Claude Bienvenu, Superphénix - Le nucléaire à la française
  6. ↑ About War and Peace in Malville
  7. ↑ 1971 Utopia or Death , Der Freitag, No. 13, March 31, 2011, p. 12.
  8. ^ Parliament.ch motion by Elmar Bigger
  9. ^ Die Saboteure ( Memento of September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Article in the weekly newspaper
  10. ↑ a b spiegel.de February 3, 1997: Phoenix in the Ashes. - The French Superphénix, the largest breeder reactor of all time, is no longer breeding. The dream of a nuclear perpetual motion machine has been over the world .
  11. ↑ a b Cour des comptes : Rapport public 1996 ( Memento of November 26, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ http://energie.edf.com/fichiers/fckeditor/Commun/En_Direct_Centrales/Nucleaire/General/Deconstruction/documents/creys/plaquette_demantelementcomposants_creys.pdf
  13. ↑ http://energie.edf.com/fichiers/fckeditor/Commun/En_Direct_Centrales/Nucleaire/Centrales/creys_malville/vie_centrale/plaquette_tna_vf_2010.pdf
  14. ↑ site Sortir du Nucleaire
  15. ↑ Power Reactor Information System of the IAEA : "France (French Republic): Nuclear Power Reactors" (English)

Web links

Commons : Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Plant  - Collection of images, videos and audio files