EDF Must Improve Reactor Maintenance, Nuclear Regulator Says

Electricite de France SA, operator of the country’s 58 nuclear reactors, needs to improve maintenance at installations and oversight of contractors at the plants, the atomic regulator said.
“No one can guarantee that there will never be a nuclear accident in France,” Andre-Claude Lacoste, head of the country’s Autorite de Surete Nucleaire, told a parliamentary commission today. Overall, EDF’s safety record in 2010 was “fairly satisfactory,” according to the watchdog’s annual report on atomic safety.
EDF needs to “better anticipate” the requirements of maintaining reactors and replacing parts, failure of which resulted in a prolonged halt at one reactor, the ASN said.
EDF’s 58 reactors make it the world’s largest generator of nuclear power and attention to safety has increased after Japan’s biggest recorded earthquake caused the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl. The European Union has pledged “stress tests” on all the region’s 143 reactors and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has asked the safety watchdog to publish the first conclusions by year-end.