Link to the study - European Parliament - Europa

Policy Department D: Budgetary Affairs
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3.2.7. Workforce
EDF has completely restructured the decommissioning section by setting up CIDEN, for which the
main functions have been described in chapter 3.2.2.
Altogether 540 persons are employed by CIDEN. 200 of them are distributed across 6 plants and 340
are working at the head office located in Lyon. The CIDEN project team directly at Chooz A involves
21 persons with clearly defined tasks.
So the relevant steps of:
Having setup a section within the company exclusively responsible for planning and project
management of the decommissioning with a complete distance to operational structures;
Having responsible planners and workers that are familiar with the facility in effectively one
dedicated organisation structure,
ensures that the structure can be optimized for the decommissioning task and that potential frictions
between previous structures and the new task can be avoided.
Another decision that is not explicitly mentioned in the available documents but can be derived from
the descriptions is that EDF fully uses its own workforce to perform the work and scarcely uses
external consultants. With that, the knowledge and experience of employees is preserved, can be
used in the planning and execution and, in the long term, can later be used in the decommissioning
of reactors that are now under operation.
Conclusions
The characteristics of the EDF decommissioning projects in respect to the workforce are:
A complete new setup of the responsible parts of the organisation;
The preferential use of available knowledge and experience;
Preferring the accumulation of internal know-how instead of extensive execution of tasks by
external consultants.
3.2.8. Financial control
EDF is constituted like a private company (stock company), so financial control over the
decommissioning project is many-fold:
EDF management, responsible for the well-being of the whole company, has to assure that the
decommissioning costs are kept as low as possible.
The stockholders (mainly the French Government, 84.44
company’s assets.
% as of 31.12.2012) control the
The French government in the form of its nuclear regulators has to ensure that the company has
enough resources set aside to cover the expenses that are necessary to decommission the
reactors.
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