Nuclear power in Europe

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s nuclear power industry is no closer to knowing how long its plants may operate than five months ago when Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new government assumed power and promised to extend their lives.

Rifts inside her center-right cabinet over the merit of rivalling renewables energies and a local election potentially threatening her party’s leadership of a key state have delayed steps to free the 17 reactors from closure in the coming decade. (more…)

The European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy (ENELA) is going to open in Germany to attract university graduates to the nuclear energy sector and train future leaders in the field.

The founding treaty of ENELA was signed here on Thursday by six European nuclear energy companies, which are shareholders of the academy. (more…)

FRANKFURT (Dow Jones) – German utility RWE AG Wednesday said it has terminated a joint venture agreement with Bulgaria’s state-owned National Electricity Co., or NEK, due to problems with the financing of a nuclear power plant that was planned to be built near the town of Belene.

“We have terminated the joint venture agreement with NEK today because of problems financing the project,” said Stephanie Schunck, spokeswoman for RWE’s power generation unit RWE Power. (more…)

Government officials have drawn up secret plans to tax electricity consumers to subsidise the construction of the UK’s first new nuclear reactors for more than 20 years, the Guardian has learned.

The planned levy on household bills would add £44 to an annual electricity bill of £500 and contradicts repeated promises by ministers that the nuclear industry would no longer benefit from public subsidies. There is mounting pressure on the power industry to show it can keep the lights on, with fears growing of an energy gap as ageing nuclear stations are retired and plans for new coal plants attract hostile protests. (more…)

The development of new nuclear plant could be prevented if the government allows too much windpower to be built, energy giants EDF and Eon have claimed.

EDF – the world’s largest nuclear operator with 58 plants – is calling on the government to lower its proposed renewable electricity target from 35% of supply in 2020 to just 20%. (more…)

Energy firms will refuse to pass on all of the savings they make on cheaper wholesale gas and electricity to consumers, one of the UK’s top energy bosses admitted this weekend.

The warning, issued by Paul Golby, chief executive of Eon UK, came after a week in which the price of oil tumbled to just above $40 a barrel. As the government demands that the banks give borrowers the benefit of the latest cut in interest rates, energy companies are also coming under increasing pressure to cut customers’ bills. (more…)

MADRID, Nov 2 (Reuters) – European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs will propose a new EU-wide energy regulator with equal powers to national regulators and will push for greater independence for those state watchdogs, he said on Sunday.

“I am going to propose a new regulation both for national regulators, to increase their real independence and their capacity to intervene, and a new Agency of European Regulators, which has to have powers comparable with national regulators,” Piebalgs told the Sunday edition of Spanish newspaper ABC. (more…)

29 October 2008 – E.ON and the research institute Commissariat à L’Energie Atomique (CEA) located in Cadarache in southern France have agreed cooperation in the field of nuclear energy research.

Cooperation will mainly focus on material research, innovation in reactor technology and safety as well as the development of the next power station generation. The research results will thus contribute to both safe operation of existing plants and the planning and implementation of new power station projects. (more…)

Stockholm – Two of Sweden’s 10 nuclear reactors were to be offline for at least a month as checks continued on the control rods used to control the nuclear fission process, officials said Monday. The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority last week ordered operators to check the control rods after cracks were detected in the control rods at one of the three reactors at the Oskarhamn nuclear plant, south-eastern Sweden. (more…)

THE argument that nuclear should be part of any low- carbon solution to the UK’s power requirements has been put forcefully by Westminster and, unsurprisingly, by the nuclear lobby. The counter argument – that it is, at best, a diversion from renewable energy – has been put equally forcefully by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (more…)