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.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is anything but a left-wing greenie. The party she leads, the Christian Democratic Union, is the political equivalent of the Republicans in the US. Her coalition government is decidedly pro-business. Often described as Europe's most powerful politician, Merkel's top priority is job creation and economic growth.
Yet if the chancellor succeeds with her new energy policy, she will become the first leader to transform an industrialized nation from nuclear and fossil fuel energy to renewable power.
Energy Solutions of Oak Ridge, TN has applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to import up to 1000 tons of radioactive waste from Eckert and Ziegler Nuclitec, a German company that specializes in the collection, processing, and disposal of these materials from hospitals, research, and technical facilities world wide.
BERLIN (Dow Jones)--German utility Vattenfall Europe AG has again delayed the planned restart of its nuclear power plant Kruemmel by some six months, Chief Executive Tuomo Hatakka told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday.
On the sidelines of the Handelsblatt energy conference in Berlin Hatakka also indicated that the company's second northern German reactor--Brunsbuettel--might not be restarted at all if a review of the two power plants shows that a recently introduced tax on nuclear fuel in Germany makes the reactor loss-making.
FRANKFURT, Dec 15 (Reuters) - E.ON and Vattenfall are in talks that may give E.ON full management of two northern German nuclear power plants they jointly own and run, the two utilities said in a statement on Wednesday.
Both Kruemmel, a 1,402 megawatts (MW) capacity plant operated on a 50/50 basis, and 806 MW Brunsbuettel, where Vattenfall has two thirds and E.ON one third, have been offline since security glitches in the summer of 2007 grounded them.
