DUKOVANY NUCLEAR PLANT, Czech Republic — Surrounded by corn fields, bicycle routes and a nature reserve, the eight huge cooling towers of the Dukovany nuclear power plant have dominated the Czech countryside near the Austrian border for almost three decades.
Against the odds, the government has worked to keep it that way for many years to come.
Europe is preparing new stress tests designed to put nuclear power stations through their paces. It's a response primarily to the problems at Japan's Fukushima plant. But will the tests be as rigorous as promised?
The European Commission is set to present a draft for its new nuclear stress tests next week. While the Fukushima power plant, ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, teetered on the brink of meltdown in March, European leaders agreed to set the "highest standards" of nuclear safety, with a mandatory round of new stress tests key to achieving this goal.
Austrian companies have shown interest in taking part in the project to build a second Bulgarian Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in the Danube town of Belene.
The information was reported Tuesday by Dr. Michael Angerer, Commercial Counsellor with Austrian Embassy in Bulgaria, during a conference dedicated to the competitiveness of Bulgaria's economy.
Brussels is against member states exporting their nuclear waste to countries outside the EU or to store it in joint sites, energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger said, as the commission is working on a set of common safety standards for this dangerous material.
"It is the duty of national politicians to do their homework," Mr Oettinger told Financial Times Deutschland in an interview published on Wednesday (10 March). The German commissioner warned against common storage sites, as well as exporting the radioactive material outside the EU, for instance Russia.
(VIENNA) - The Austrian Green party called Tuesday for Austria to quit the European Atomic Energy Community (Euroatom or EAEC), saying public money paid to the body could be better used elsewhere.
Austria, which is constitutionally opposed to nuclear energy, "must exit the Euroatom Treaty," Green party spokeswoman Eva Glawischnig said.
VIENNA (Reuters) - A small amount of plutonium which leaked from an ageing International Atomic Energy Agency laboratory near Vienna did not reach the environment, according to an independent inquiry cited by the U.N. watchdog on Friday.
The August 3 incident at the Seibersdorf analytical lab, which occurred overnight and caused no injury, raised a stir in Austria, which hosts the IAEA but rejects nuclear energy itself as fundamentally dangerous.
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Incident involving radioactive material at IAEA safeguards laboratory |
Pressure build-up in a small sealed sample bottle in a storage safe resulted in plutonium contamination of a storage room at about 02:30h on 3 August 2008 at the IAEA's Safeguards Analytical Laboratory in Seibersdorf.
All indications are that there was no release of radioactivity to the environment. Further monitoring around the laboratory will be undertaken. No one was working in the laboratory at the time.
VIENNA, Aug 4 (Reuters) - A small amount of plutonium leaked in an ageing International Atomic Energy Agency laboratory outside Vienna but radioactive contamination was contained to a storage area and no one was injured, the U.N. watchdog said. Last year the IAEA director warned that its main analytical lab built in 1970 was outmoded and no longer met U.N. safety standards, and he called for 27.2 million euros ($42.4 milion) in extra funding from member states to modernise it.
VIENNA Thomson Financial - Greenpeace activists 'walled in' a branch of one of Austria's largest banks, Erste Bank AG, in the centre of Vienna on this morning in protest against its financing of the Mochovce nuclear plant in Slovakia.
A group of around thirty activists erected a brickwall in front of the bank's main entrance on one of the capital's busy pedestrian zones and called for Erste Bank to cancel its loan to the Slovak utility Slovenske Elektrarne.
ENDS Europe DAILY 2489, 21/02/08
Austria is threatening to veto an EU resolution on a proposed plan to boost low-carbon technologies in Europe unless the bloc's 27 energy ministers agree nuclear research should not receive any extra EU funds, it emerged on Wednesday.
