Nuclear power in Europe

MOSCOW, Nov. 18 (UPI) — An uncompleted project to clean up a radioactive former dump in a densely populated Moscow suburb is endangering the health of residents, advocates say.

A mound along Marshala Rokossovskogo Boulevard that for years was used by children as a sledding hill actually contained radioactive waste dumped there in the 1940s and 1950s, and after beginning an excavation to enable the building of new apartments on the site, officials have suspended the operation, the Moscow Times reported Tuesday. (more…)

RAUMA, Finland — The cafe where Paivi Alanko-Rehelma serves coffee and smoked fish stands practically in the shadow of a sprawling building site on the island of Olkiluoto where Finland is erecting a nuclear power plant, the island’s third, and Finland’s fifth in the last 30 years.

Rauma is about 10 miles from Olkiluoto, a nuclear plant site. (more…)

Projected cost of Mochovce’s completion has ballooned

10 Nov 2008 Beata Balogová Business - JUST weeks after the government approved its strategy on energy security, which is intended to guide policy for the next 20 years or so and which defined nuclear energy as one of its key pillars, Slovakia’s dominant power generator started the construction phase of two further blocks at the Mochovce nuclear plant. (more…)

Sofia. German company RWE will from now on decide whether to grant the investment promised.
The signing of the shareholding contract for Belene nuclear power plant through which German company RWE will gain 49% of the future plant’s stakes, was postponed. Instead of end-October 2008 when the last deadline expired, the paper will most likely be endorsed in December 2008, the project’s main investor National Electricity Company (NEC) said, The Banker Weekly reported. (more…)

Bulgaria’s planned nuclear power plant at Belene on the Danube River is amongst the most dangerous contemplated projects of its kind in the whole world, Greenpeace nuclear analyst Heinz Smital has said, as quoted by Deutsche Welle.

According to Smital’s warning, Belene was massive and irresponsible gamble, which would only tarnish the reparation of RWE, the German company picked as the strategic investor in the nuclear power plant. Far worse, the German company was playing Russian roulette with people’s lives in the entire region of South-Eastern Europe, he said. (more…)

Public consultations carried out by the government on new nuclear energy plants were flawed, the UK’s market research trade body ruled yesterday.

The Market Research Standards Board said the consultation, carried out by Opinion Leader Research, was in breach of its code of conduct. In the sessions in which the public were asked for their opinions on nuclear power, “information was inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced, which gave rise to a material risk of respondents being led towards a particular answer”. (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…)

ANKARA (AFP) — Police detained 40 protestors Tuesday in a demonstration against government plans to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, a day before the tender process was to open, activists said.

Several dozen members of environmental groups, among them Greenpeace, demonstrated outside the energy ministry in central Ankara, brandishing banners that read “No to nuclear.” (more…)

Finland’s plans to build the world’s first next-generation pressurised water reactor has hit a rough patch as the initial estimated price tag has now doubled to nearly 4.5 billion euro. Areva, the French nuclear construction company building the power plant, announced that the final costs for the reactor will be 50 percent higher than originally estimated, according to Les Echos, a business newspaper. (more…)

On September 9 Bulgarian and international environmental organisations, including the local coalition BeleNE (No to Belene nuclear power plant) and Greenpeace, sent a letter to the European Union (EU) Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes asking her to investigate the tender procedures for subcontractors in the construction of Bulgaria’s Belene nuclear power plant. (more…)