Are French lives more important than SA lives? A recent research report by Tristen Taylor for the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Cape Town, which explores safety upgrades taking place at French nuclear power stations to extend their lives beyond their original decommissioning dates compared with what is happening at the Koeberg nuclear power station to extend its life, would suggest that they are. These nuclear power station lifetime extensions are commonly known as long-term operation (LTO) programmes.
French company Framatome built Koeberg’s two reactors to the exact same design as 18 reactors that are now having their lives extended in France. These reactors, known as pressurised water reactors (PWRs), account for almost 70% of all operational commercial reactors worldwide. The 18 PWRs in France and the two at Koeberg — all of which were built in the 1970s and 1980s — are known as Generation II reactors and were designed before the major nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. More modern Generation III reactors have incorporated significant safety design improvements as a result of these serious accidents, and no nuclear regulator would now approve a Generation II design.
To extend the life of Generation II PWRs in terms of its LTO programme French nuclear regulator Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) states that existing reactors must “be upgraded in line with these new safety requirements” to get them as close as possible to the modern safety standards in Generation III reactors.
In France, three main safety improvements have to be made to Generation II PWRs to satisfy the requirements of the ASN. First, reactors undergoing LTO have to be better able to control and mitigate extreme hazards such as fire, explosion, earthquakes and flooding. Second, the safety of spent fuel storage pools needs to be improved. Finally, core catchers need to be retrofitted to mitigate the consequences of a core meltdown.
A core catcher (made from thermally resistant concrete ceramic) is placed underneath a reactor and is designed to prevent molten radioactive fuel (corium) burning through the bottom of the reactor and into the wider environment in the case of a core meltdown. The ASN states that retrofitting core catchers is non-negotiable as it is absolutely critical to the safety of nuclear reactors. In short, no LTO will be licensed in France without a core catcher.
In addition to these critical infrastructural changes, further regulatory safety standards are being applied as part of the French programme. Every five years integrated leak tests will have to be conducted on reactor containment buildings to ensure they will not leak radioactive material and gases if the reactor vessel is breached during an accident. Importantly, the ASN is also allowing the licences of Generation II PWRs to be extended for only 10 years, after which each PWR will have to undergo a comprehensive safety, ageing and materials assessment.
These stringent requirements in terms of active and passive safety measures and regulations contrast starkly with what is happening at Koeberg during its current LTO programme. Eskom has simply declared — contrary to the opinion of the French company that built Koeberg — that Generation II safety standards are adequate, an assertion that has not been challenged by SA’s National Nuclear Regulator. As such, the regulator is not insisting that core catchers be retrofitted at Koeberg, despite this now being considered critical to the safety of commercial nuclear reactors elsewhere in the world.
Integrated leak tests will also be undertaken only every 10 years in SA, as opposed to five years in France. Incidentally, Koeberg’s last integrated leak test took place nine years ago, meaning the next test will take place after the nuclear regulator has made its decision on the LTO at Koeberg. The regulator is also being asked by Eskom to approve a 20-year LTO licence extension for Koeberg, double the licensing duration allowed in France.
This difference in safety standards being applied in SA compared with France is alarming on its own, but is especially so given the problems Eskom has experienced relating to cracks in the reactor containment structures and spent fuel pools at Koeberg. In 2017 Eskom admitted that “approximately 10% of the containment building surface area [has] delaminated, and chloride ingress extends past the rebar cover depth” (delamination refers to the fracturing of material, in this instance concrete, into layers).
In 2021, an Eskom report noted the existence of a crack that extended 110m around one of Koeberg’s reactor containment domes. Despite these serious safety issues being flagged, a year later the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated after inspecting Koeberg to see if it was ready for its LTO that Eskom had failed to ensure that a containment structure monitoring system was “fully functional”.
The same inspection noted that the spent fuel pool of reactor 2 at Koeberg had leaked “during the plant's life” and that the cause of the leak had not been discovered. This is shocking because the fuel pools at Koeberg are already seriously overloaded with spent fuel, having to be triple racked because Eskom has no long-term plan for what to do with spent fuel.
These, and numerous other concerns raised by the agency in 2022, prompted it to conclude that “management of the LTO programme is not effective to timely complete all actions to prepare for LTO”. The IAEA’s finding is deeply troubling given the shocking lack of safety improvements that Eskom is undertaking to ensure the safe long-term operation of Koeberg compared with what is taking place in France.
While the National Nuclear Regulator has yet to approve the LTO at Koeberg and public hearings have been conducted in the Western Cape and Northern Cape in recent weeks to hear objections, it is a sobering thought that if it were in France, Koeberg would be shut down in a few months’ time at the end of its original 40-year life because those who built it would consider it unsafe.
• Dr Overy, a freelance researcher, writer and photographer, is a research associate in Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town.
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