Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon has said, in testimony on 13 January before the Sustainable Development Committee of the French National Assembly, that Areva and its partners lost the tender to supply reactors to the United Arab Emirates because the EPR’s safety measures made the French offer more expensive than the winning South Korean bid, .

On December 27 last year Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp. (ENEC), announced that it had chosen a consortium led by Korea Electric Power Corporation to build four APR-1400 PWR units for about $20 billion and would negotiate a follow-on contract for their future operation witht he same group. A French consortium had proposed Areva’s 1650 MW class EPR pressurised water reactor, and GE Hitachi had proposed its 1350-MW advanced boiling water reacctor (ABWR). Lauvergeon said that the outcome of the UAE bid poses fundamental questions about the nature of the world nuclear market and the level of safety requirements for reactors that will still be operating in 2050 or 2070.

Lauvergeon rejected criticism from the French media over France’s losing bid. She said EPR didn’t lose because of delays with EPR construction projects in Finland and France or because the French ‘nuclear team’ was not united behind the bid, but because the South Koreans were determined to get their first nuclear export job, ‘and they paid for it’ with a lower price.

Lauvergeon said the French team could have had the job had it been willing to lower its price to match the Korean tender, but would not do so. She said, “Would it have been better to sign a contract that let us flex our muscles for a while but that we would have regretted for the next 15 years? … At some point, you have to be able to say, ‘not at that price, no.’”

The French consortium consisted of EdF, GDF-Suez and Total as investors and possibly as operators, and Areva, Alstom and Vinci as suppliers. According to Korean media reports, the Korean bid was almost 30% lower per kilowatt than the EPR bid, while the GE Hitachi offer was said to be higher than the French bid.

Areva has been criticised in the French media for bidding the contract without EdF int he team but Lauvergeon denies this. At the very beginning, she said, she had twice asked the then EdF CEO Pierre Gadonneix to be in on the UAE bid, but Gadonneix had refused. It was then that Areva formed the initial consortium with GDF-Suez and Total.

EDF became leader of the UAE bid only at the last minute, in December, at the request of ENEC, which Lauvergeon said wanted ‘a single contractor’ for both construction and operation phases of the reactor project. ENEC asked for EDF after the French government announced a year ago that EDF would build a second EPR in France, she said. GDF Suez has yet no experience building aGIII (third generation) reactor.