(BRUSSELS) - France, Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic rejected a report Friday that they want nuclear energy to receive subsidies similar to the ones enjoyed by renewable energies.
The German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported earlier that those four countries sent letters outlining their request to Brussels ahead of a meeting by European Union energy ministers next week.
The German government ill consider setting up a publicly administered fund to manage the disposal of nuclear waste from its power plants, environment minister Norbert Röttgen said following the publication of a Greenpeace report on Wednesday.
Greenpeace has called for a public fund because it fears German nuclear operators Eon, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall may go bankrupt or try to wriggle out of their obligations after 2022, when the last of Germany’s reactors are due to close.
At a time when Germany's solar industry is suffering from weakened political support, the Technical Inspection Association, TÜV, has uncovered rusted radioactive waste barrels in the already inoperative Brunsbüttel nuclear plant in northern Germany.
The nuclear power plant, which was shut down last year has an underground storage of approximately 500 barrels of low and intermediate levels of radioactive waste from the reactors. In order to move the waste to end-disposal point, Schacht Konrad repository in Lower Saxony, the material has to be transferred to cast iron containers. Amidst this process, TÜV North made the discovery of rusted barrels.
PARIS, Feb 10 (Reuters) - French weekend prices jumped early on Friday as a second unplanned nuclear outage within 12 hours caused panic in the market about a supply shortage, but prices for next week were steady as warmer weather was expected to ease demand pressure.
French baseload power for Saturday delivery traded nearly twice as high as in the neighbouring German market at 100.00 euros, after EDF's 1,300 Cattenom 2 nuclear reactor went offline unexpectedly overnight, tightening supply margins already under strain from high winter demand.
The government's energy policy took another blow on Friday as major energy provider RWE reviewed whether to scale down or abandon its UK nuclear programme.
The German-owned utility, which owns the npower supply business, has started an internal probe of its plans to construct two possible atomic power stations at Wylfa in Wales and Oldbury in Gloucestershire.
German industrial and engineering conglomerate Siemens is to withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry.
The move is a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March, chief executive Peter Loescher said.
He told Spiegel magazine it was the firm's answer to "the clear positioning of German society and politics for a pullout from nuclear energy".
Some 800m below the town of Gorleben, northern Germany, salt glistens like ice underfoot.
The man in charge of the nation’s nuclear waste is walking through caverns carved into a huge salt formation that could one day entomb 17,000 tonnes of highly radioactive detritus.
Germany's grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA) said Wednesday that it has decided against keeping one idled nuclear reactor on standby as reserve capacity for the coming two winter seasons to ensure power grid stability after the government permanently closed eight older reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in March.
"Our investigations have shown that even in exceptional contingencies the transmission system will remain operational without the dispatch of a reserve nuclear power plant," BNetzA President Matthias Kurth said in a statement.
Northern German nuclear reactor Brokdorf may stay closed for several weeks after it was taken offline on Sunday, a spokeswoman for operator E.ON said on Tuesday.
E.ON hoped to know by the end of this week what the future schedule for the plant would be, the spokeswoman said, adding that E.ON assumed that a transformer at the plant needed to be swapped out.
FRANKFURT/DUESSELDORF, July 11 (Reuters) - Germany's cartel office said on Monday it would "closely" examine any investment by Gazprom in RWE after reports the weakened German utility was open to an investment by the Russian gas monopoly.
Essen-based RWE has been hit by loss-making gas contracts and weak power prices, and is also under threat from a German tax on nuclear fuel that came into effect this year.
