The Ministry of the Armed Forces announced on Monday March 18 a “collaboration” with EDF in order to use the power of the two nuclear reactors at the Civaux plant to produce tritium with the CEA, “a rare gas essential for deterrence weapons”. This announcement, presented as a long-term project, follows a visit by the Minister of Defense, Sébastien Lecornu, to Civaux, in Vienne.
In a press release, his ministry announced a “collaboration between EDF and defense consisting of installing a materials irradiation service on the site. This involves exploiting the power of the two Civaux reactors to, alongside unchanged electricity production, irradiate special materials containing lithium into the reactor cores. “Once irradiated, these will be transferred to a CEA site”, the Atomic Energy Commission, “in order to produce tritium, a rare gas essential for deterrence weapons”, details the press release.
“This collaboration has been under study since the 1990s and is part of long-standing planning, usual for defense industrial tools,” says the ministry, which specifies that an agreement between the State, the CEA and EDF “will be signed, setting the scope of activities, the rights and obligations of each party in compliance with governance rules”.
The use of the power plant is not imminent, warned Etienne Dutheil, director of the nuclear production division at EDF, during a press briefing. “Bringing material to be irradiated into the reactor core will very slightly modify the operating parameters of the reactor, and it will be necessary to carry out a safety assessment as for any other modification” of this type, he said. warned.
First test in 2025
In order to carry out the first tests, EDF will submit a modification file at the start of the 2024 school year “to the ASN [Nuclear Safety Authority, the sector watchdog], which will examine it with the IRSN [its technical expert] and [whose] outcome will give us authorization to carry out this operation or not,” he explained.
EDF is aiming for a first small-scale test during one of the two shutdowns scheduled for 2025 at the power plant. Tritium is a “difficult to produce gas, which disintegrates and disappears spontaneously”, recalls the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which adds that “any stock is reduced by half after twelve years, three quarters after twenty-five years , 99.5% after a century.” It is therefore necessary to “produce it regularly”.
“The project that is being undertaken today aims to allow the people who will be responsible for the French deterrent in fifteen or twenty years to continue to have all possible options,” said Mr. Dutheil. “We are not carrying out this irradiation service because we have needs now, right away,” he insisted. The Civaux power plant was chosen because it is “the youngest power plant in service in the fleet and therefore has a maximum capacity to continue its operating life,” concluded Mr. Dutheil.