As promised, we bring you the latest on our experience here in France. On Thursday morning we departed our hotel at 8am for a site visit cheduled at the Nuclear Plant of Penly (approx 4hrs by bus from our hotel).The site is located on the Manche Sea Coast, employing approx 800 people. The Plant is one of the newest French Nuclear Plants by AREVA NP, the leaders in this industry. It was originally built in 1990 & produces 2,600MW of of power compared to Koeberg's 1,800MW. Two new EPR reactors are being built and is anticipated to start-up in 2017. We've been told that it takes approx 12yrs to build one of these Plants from start to finish and it is quite capital intensive both from a CAPEX & OPEX perspective, in our view perhaps one of the reasons why SA has put it on the back-burner. Uranium input (yellow-cake) comes from SA (nogal), Gabon, Niger, Malawi & Canada. Perhaps an idea to buy some uranium shares & stocks given the outlook from this side.
We also learned that there are currently 50 Nuclear Reactors across France, generating 88% of the local electricity. The 12% balance is sold off to London which is only about 120km across the channel from where the Plant is situated.
Containment & disposal of used uranium/ radioactive materials (iron rods)was a question that Albertyn did not get an answer on, the host pussy-footed around this point in the Q&A session, however, the fuel assemblys are serviced annually during shutdow we were told.
Very interesting stuff, learnt alot and still under quarantine for radioactivity which is why we're in the hotel at this hour on a Saturday night in Paris ;-)
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