This is why Fllammanville is years behind

[The Natural Philosopher]

" Inspections by the ASN (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire) in recent months aroused its concerns about the lack of an emergency stop that would be able to simultaneously halt both the polar crane's trolleys and two temporary trolleys (referred to as temporary lifting devices, TLDs), and also the lack of a global load limiter in the case of simultaneous use of at least two of the crane's trolleys.

The ASN says that it has not yet received all the answers and guarantees it requires from EDF, and has now instructed the company not to use the equipment until a final compliance report has been completed and an action plan to remedy any non-compliance has been implemented."

The regulator invents an arbitrary and totally unlikely scenario, and demands to know 'what they would do if it ever happened'.

Meanwhile construction is halted, some redesign presumably has to take place so a new button with new wires can be out in marked 'this one stops everything' and the whole design re-certified because 7 new cables have been added to it since last certifications. And of couse these will have to be tested every time its due for a statutory outage, and if they don't work, the reactor will have to be shut down for 'safety reasons'

there's another 6 months and a billion in 'consultants' and interest charges gone then.

[newshound]

Whilst I know nothing about the specific case, let me suggest another scenario. A perfectly plausible fault sequence has been identified which could lead to fatalities for operators or construction workers. The regulator asks repeatedly for action and the operator promises a response but delivers nothing effective. At some point the regulator has had enough and issues a stop notice, something you would want to happen in many regulated industries, not just nuclear. Now, it will get fixed. I bet it is not all that expensive. It looks to me as though it is a construction issue, not an operational one, so I would expect no significant impact in the long term.

[alan]

You seem to indicate that the regulator is incompetent with respect to the judgement of safety cases. This is a very good reason to completely close down the facility and have a thorough review of all the safety cases that have been passed by the same regulator.

The regulators probably have the same cavalier attitude to safety as those who considered Fukushima as a tsunami free zone.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No regulator did that. It was cleared to a 5m tsunami. unfortunately a

50 megaton event under the sea that killed >10,000 people created a rather bigger one..which in the end didn't kill anyone due to messing up Fukushima.

I can imagine you somewhere clinging to a bit of debris as the whole of whatever town you live in is inundated and people are dying in thousands around you and saying 'well at least we will have nuclear power tomorrow'

Or as the asteroid crashes into London and flattens it killing 20 million people you can die knowing that the shockwave wont crack the thames estuary reactors.

That's the sort of thing that really makes sense.

[GB]

You missed this bit, apparently:

"also the lack of a global load limiter in the case of simultaneous use of at least two of the crane's trolleys."

So, you have one crane gantry with multiple cranes hanging from it. Wouldn't you say it's *essential* to limit the load on the whole structure to the SWL, not just the loads on each individual crane? I would. And the failure to incorporate that in the original design spec seems a bit daft.

Of course, there may be a sound explanation. For example, the SWL of the gantry is ten times the combined SWLs of the crane, but why would they have made it so strong?

I certainly don't see how you can valid conclude that the nuclear regulator is being silly just based on the info in that article.