Nuclear power in Europe

High-level nuclear waste from across the European Union could be shipped to eastern Europe for burial in a central underground storage facility under plans being considered by EU member states.

The Times has learnt that the project, which comes amid a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, could be given the green light later this year by the European Commission. Ewoud Verhoef, deputy director of Covra, the agency responsible for the storage of the Netherlands´ nuclear waste, said: “The nuclear programme in Holland is small and the cost of building a geological repository is very high. We only have one nuclear reactor in the Netherlands so there would be big advantages to a shared solution.” (more…)

VILNIUS — Lithuania Thursday shut down its Soviet-era nuclear plant under an EU deal in a move set to drive up electricity prices amid an economic crisis and leave it counting on ex-master Moscow for power.

“At 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) everything went offline. It all went according to plan,” Viktor Sevaldin, director of the 26-year-old plant, told AFP by telephone. (more…)

The European Commission decided to extend the period of financial support to Bulgaria for the decommissioning of units 1 to 4 of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant. On top of the EUR550 million already allocated, the Commission has pledged a sum of EUR300 million for the time period 2010-2013. (more…)

VILNIUS – Lithuania is staring down the barrel of an energy crisis. The fact is the previous government did little to fix the problem, and the country now faces the prospect of being left in the long feared hands of Russian gas company Gazprom for electricity and heating.
Russia has been licking its chops thinking of the profits it will make while political infighting and bureaucracy saw Lithuania’s energy future go nowhere. (more…)

Andres Mäe, researcher of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, Estonia, answered questions about prospects of energy security and nuclear industry of the Baltic region. (more…)

From the Baltic to Bulgaria, governments in Eastern Europe are increasingly looking toward a revival of nuclear power generation to meet growing energy demand.

The renewed interest in nuclear energy in a region that has been under intense pressure from the European Union to close unsafe older- generation plants coincides with a lively debate in several West European countries, in which governments seek cleaner energy options to combat climate change. (more…)

The consortium of the Energiewerke Nord GmbH (EWN), Sintagma UAB and Ernst & Young Baltic UAB successfully completed in September 2008 the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) decommissioning management system and database (DMSD) project.

The joint team with subcontractors IBM and CORE2 provided all services according to the project schedule of 14 months. Beside the delivery of a comprehensive set of different IT equipment, an enlarged training of nominated INPP staff was performed. The project was financed by the International Ignalina Decommissioning Support Fund managed by the Central Project Management Agency with the overall value of 3.5 million EUR. (more…)

Aleksandras Abisala, chief negotiator over the extension of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, who used to speak about the considerable growth of the possibility to reach an agreement on the extension of the operation of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, now claims that Lithuania has lost this fight.

After the last week”s European Council in Brussels, when the hopes concerning the extension of the operation of the Ignalina nuclear power plant diminished, Abisala admits that Lithuania has lost the fight, lrt.lt writes. (more…)

WARSAW – Poland hopes to reduce its heavy reliance on coal, which produces harmful greenhouse gases, by building a few nuclear power plants by 2030, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Waldemar Pawlak said on Thursday.

Pawlak’s ministry is currently working on a new energy strategy designed to meet the Polish economy’s booming demand for electricity and to modernize its communist-era power plants. (more…)

Vilnius – A referendum held in Lithuania to decide the future of the Baltic nation’s only nuclear power plant has failed to attract the necessary number of voters to be judged valid, official sources said on Monday. Lithuania agreed to close its Ignalina nuclear power plant by 2009 as part of its deal to join the European Union in 2004. A planned replacement, to be built jointly with Estonia, Latvia and Poland, is unlikely to be ready before 2015. (more…)