Nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest reactor goes into operation in Finland – Corriere.it

While European countries continue to divide over nuclear power, Europe’s most powerful nuclear reactor went into operation on Sunday 16 April on the island of Olkiluoto, in Finland, after a test phase that lasted more than a year. Olkiluoto 3 has a capacity of 1,600 megawatts and is the first reactor built in the EU in the last 15 years. The goal of the Helsinki government is to reduce energy imports from neighboring countries, especially Sweden and Norway. According to experts, the final cost of the project amounts to about 11 billion euros, three times more than initially estimated. Finland currently has five nuclear reactors in two power plants located on the shores of the Baltic Sea, which together cover more than 40% of the country’s electricity demand.

An 18-year project

Construction of Olkiluoto 3 started in 2005 and was scheduled to be completed four years later. But due to a series of setbacks and delays it took 18 years for it to be up and running . Operator Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO), owned by Finnish utility company Fortum and a consortium of energy and industrial companies, said the reactor is expected to meet about 14 percent of Finland’s electricity demand. It has an estimated operational life of 60 years and can exploit enriched uranium oxides or uranium and plutonium oxides. Ol3 a pressurized water reactor (European Pressurized Reactor or Evolutionary Power Reactor). In this type of plant, pressurized liquid water is used to cool the core and to slow down the neutrons. The production of Olkiluoto 3 stabilizes the price of electricity and plays an important role in Finland’s green transition, said TVO CEO Jarmo Tanhua.

In the EU we continue to divide

In the EU, the positions of the member states continue to be distant from each other when it comes to nuclear power. The French government, according to the newspaper Le Figaro, would like to build a new nuclear park of at least six and probably 14 Epr2 nuclear reactors, with an estimated total cost of 60 billion euros, with hundreds of thousands of professionals and 4,000 companies involved. Germany, on the other hand, closed the last three nuclear power plants in the country on April 16. The shutdown of the Isar 2 (south-east), Neckarwestheim (south-west) and Emsland (north-west) plants represents the fulfillment of a process started after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, in 2011. An event which convinced the then chancellor Angela Merkel to close with the season of the atom. The definitive exit had been scheduled for the end of December 2022, but due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, the government of Olaf Scholz had decided to postpone the stop for four months. As for Italy, the Minister of the Environment and Energy Security, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin said he was in favor of nuclear energy. I believe that by 2050 this carbon neutrality can be achieved largely with renewable energies, hydroelectric, photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, but without nuclear power – the conviction of the entire G7 table as well as of the G20 – it will not be possible to achieve it . Pichetto Fratin specified that we are no longer talking about nuclear power with old generation plants. By now research and experimentation are moving towards fourth generation fission power plants, without waiting for the fusion that will arrive in 50-70 years.