Gravelines Nuclear Power Station

The site employs 1,680 regular employees. As of 2 August 2010, it became the second nuclear power station anywhere in the world to produce over one thousand terawatt-hours of electricity, following Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, Canada, which had reached that milestone in 2009.

The reactors of Units 5 and 6 were initially intended for export to Iran, but the order was cancelled after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Their design, known as CPY, was the basis for the Chinese CPR-1000. An intermediate derivative of the reactor is called the M310.

Incidents

• In 2006, when Unit 3 was taken offline for routine refueling, it was discovered that an electrical wire had not been plugged in correctly during the last outage in 2005. This ranked Level-1 on the INES Scale, the lowest level on the 7-point scale
• In 2007, the plant experienced four separate events that qualified as Level 1 on the INES Scale.
• In August 2009, during the annual exchange of fuel bundles in Reactor-1, one bundle got stuck to the upper handling structure, stopping the operations and causing the evacuation and isolation of the reactor's building.
• On 11 August 2025, the plant was shut down after a swarm of jellyfish clogged the facility's cooling system. Three reactors were shut down again, on 11 August 2026, because of a very large swarm of jellyfish.