A brief review of a confidential leaked EdF document
Summary
This is a brief review of a confidential EdF document that has been leaked to the public domain in France.
The EdF document relates to the projected performance of the AREVA designed Generation III EPR reactor. The first of this reactor type is presently being built at Olkiluoto in Finland and construction of a second EPR is expected to commence shortly at the established nuclear power station site at Flamanville in France.
In or about 2003 it seems that EdF prepared a statement to the Direction Générale de la Sureté Nucléaire et de la Radioprotection in response to its request to demonstrate the safety of the EPR design against the deliberate crashing of a large civil aircraft onto the nuclear island. The resulting EdF document endeavours to prove the ability of the plant to withstand such attack and it claims to do so by comparing the footprint and time sequencing of the impact of a small military (fighter) aircraft to that of a large, fully fuelled commercial airliner.
However, this leaked EdF document shows the claim to be flawed in a number of important respects: First, in that the impact signatures of the small military fighter and very much larger commercial passenger aircraft are unlikely, contrary to the reckoning of EdF, to be sufficiently similar in both time span and magnitude for the design resistance of the EPR to an accidental military aircraft strike to equally apply to a passenger airliner intentionally targeted the nuclear island of the plant - indeed, the basis of reckoning the resistance of the built structures is so grossly simplified that it is inapplicable to a real impact situation.
Second, the EdF assumption that the 100 or more tonnes of aviation fuel spilt during the moment of impact would ignite and burn itself out within 2 minutes or so is entirely without justification and unproven, with there being a good possibility that highly explosive vapour would be formed within and around the structures, the deflagration of which could be severely damaging to the EPR building structures and nuclear equipment within. And, quite incredibly, one line of mitigation proposed by EdF is that the terrorist would have insufficient skills to pilot the aircraft onto the intended target, this being quite contrary to the dedicated training undertaken by the terrorists who masterminded the 9/11 attacks.
