Bruno Lescoeur letter

EdF wrote to the French Government after 9/11, in 2003, saying their reactors could resist a military aircraft crashing into one of their EPR reactors now proposed for Hinkley Point. It would be the responsibility of the French Government to prevent a more serious deliberate attack. Resisting is not the same as withstanding a deliberate attack, especially that of a massive jet airliner filled with fuel. The carefully worded letter just says that the ability to resist a military plane gives 'an important capacity' to the EPR to resist the impact of a commercial airliner crashing into it. Since the letter became public in 2006 through anti-nuclear group Sortir du Nuclaire, EdF claim to have reinforced the design.

But the question remains, how much extra reinforcement can a reactor design take before it really needs to be taken back to square one?

** Note: [Stop Hinkley emphasised in bold certain key phrases] **

Bruno Lescoeur
Director Energy Department EDF
Site Cap Ampère, 1 place Pleyel
93282 SAINT-DENIS CEDEX

To The Director of Radioprotection and Nuclear Security
6 place du Colonel Bourgoin,
75572 PARIS

Paris, August 12th 2003

Dear Sir,

In your letter, you ask me to examine the EPR reactor capacity of resistance to/to withstand an potential commercial plane crash, and then to make any necessary suggestions. Very quickly after the September 11th attacks in the USA , the EDF made a point of analysing the problem and in particular with regards to the conception/design of the EPR.

As you note in your letter, the new project takes into account resistance to a military plane crash, which is already a heavy charge. For this, the designers have chosen functional and geographical building plans taking account of such accidents. The project has 4 trains which are completely separate, and a part of the construction is "bunkerised", in particular the buildings containing the reactor and used nuclear fuel, and one building containing 2 of the 4 safeguards trains (electrical and mechanical parts).

The "bunkerised" part, designed to resist to the impact of a military plane, presents a high resistance and especially with regards to perforation : a military plane is considered to be the equivalent of a perforating missile.

All this gives to the EPR an important capacity to resist to the impact of a commercial plane, so no change has been made in the construction plans.

Despite this capacity for resistance to plane accidents, it is nevertheless necessary to note that EDF is not in a position to ensure resistance to eventual war or terrorist action. Prevention or limitation of such action and its possible results involve State responsibility In this case

- The controls concerning resistance to such accidents and any necessary supplementary measures are to be considered as outside the (normal )design basis of the building, and I am obliged to place this situation amongst the " Risk Reduction Categories "

- The study of different possibilities concerning an impact should induce a reasonable response to the risk incurred and will not be able to take into consideration/cover each and every possibility . Furthermore, the measures should, in my opinion, be in complete coherence with the measures adopted internationally, and should not be too different from the measures adopted for other industrial risks. I also consider that the different scenarios studied, the rules and analysis used to do so should not appear in the security reports immediately available or which could become available to the public.

Precisions concerning this general logic are to be found in the joined annex. And, added to this, in order to decide or control the design basis of the protective construction/shear wall of the "bunkerised" part of the building, it will be necessary to define a reference impact load. This reference, whilst generally covering the case of the sort of planes which could crash in the event of an intentional action, should not be associated directly to a particular plane nor to a particular speed of impact. It should correspond to a general hypothesis based on criteria and calculation of a general and conventional nature.

For this reason I propose to retain as the reference the impact charge given in the annex which represents the risks reasonably considered possible by the sorts of planes in European skies.

Yours faithfully,

B. LESCOEUR.