PARIS (Reuters) -French power company EDF said it extended the outage at its 1.3 gigawatt Golfech 2 nuclear reactor in south-western France on Monday because river water used to cool the reactor had surpassed maximum temperatures due to excessively hot weather.
Some technical issues at the reactor also played a role in delaying the restart to Aug. 25, an EDF spokesperson told Reuters. The reactor has been offline since March 27 and had been scheduled to restart on Sunday.
Water temperature levels for cooling purposes at the Bugey plant and another reactor along the Rhone river in the southeast were also seen surpassing the government’s guidance by Aug. 24, Refinitiv data showed. EDF had previously announced production warnings at the Bugey plant.
Separately, French health minister Aurelien Rousseau told BFM TV on Monday that there was a risk some regions in southern France could be subject to a “red alert” warning due to extreme heat expected from Tuesday onwards.
For Monday, the French meteorological service had issued an orange alert for half of the country’s territory, saying temperatures will reach between 35 and 38 Celsius (95-100.4 Fahrenheit) in most of the affected regions, while peaks of 40 Celsius and above were expected in the southwest and in the Rhone valley.
(Reporting by Forrest Crellin;Writing by Tassilo Hummel;Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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