REPAIRS at British Energy's coal-fired Eggborough power station will be delayed until next year after the company said maintenance of its ageing nuclear power reactors is taking longer than expected.
The nuclear power group, which recently agreed to a £12.5bn marriage with French giant EDF, said maintenance of a unit at Eggborough in North Yorkshire will now happen in the first quarter of next year rather than November.
BRITISH Energy yesterday admitted that work had fallen behind schedule at its Hartlepool and Heysham 1 nuclear power plants and that they would be unlikely to return to service until early next year.
Maintenance work is also set to cost "marginally more" than estimated, the East Kilbride-headquartered company added.
British Energy, which last month agreed a £12.5billion takeover by France's state-owned power group EDF, owns and runs the UK's eight nuclear power stations, including Torness in East Lothian.
MORE than half of Britain's nuclear power stations are either closed or working at reduced capacity, it emerged yesterday, prompting fears of power shortages next month.
Six of the UK's ten nuclear stations are not operating at full capacity. Three are completely closed, one is operating at half capacity and two have been reduced to 70 per cent because of safety fears.
Vincent de Rivaz, the chief executive of France's EDF Energy, which is now in control of the UK's nuclear energy programme, doesn't laugh when I ask if he has succeeded where Napoleon failed.
"It's not a war," he says, very seriously. "This is an amicable agreement between two companies which will bring good news to everyone involved. Will it bring stability to customers for electricity bills? Yes. Will it bring new jobs? Yes. Will it improve climate change? Yes."
Less than two months after British Energy shareholders walked away from an earlier deal, EDF has bagged the UK nuclear power generator in a £12.4bn deal.
Selling British Energy to EDF is about more than just a handover of physical assets.
Nuclear power firm British Energy looks poised to fall into foreign hands after it was reported French power giant EDF has agreed a £12.4 billion takeover of the firm.
The deal is worth 774p a share, the Wall Street Journal said, 9p higher than a rebuffed offer made in July.
DETAILS OF a serious fire hazard at the Hunterston nuclear power station in North Ayrshire have been kept secret because they could aid a terrorist attack.
The government's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has refused to release information about a "specific fire scenario" at the reactors because to do so could "threaten national security".
Scotland's energy minister Jim Mather insisted today that "our people don't want new nuclear power and we don't need it", as he revealed new figures on renewable energy.
Speaking at the Scottish Council for Development & Industry energy conference at Murrayfield Stadium, the minister said wind farms, hydro power projects and marine renewables will mean Scotland should "comfortably" surpass its renewable energy targets set for 2011.
The credibility of the nuclear industry was shaken last night after the estimated cost of cleaning up Britain's atomic waste was raised by a further £10bn.
The latest clean-up estimate from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) suggests the commonly accepted figure of £73bn should rise to £83bn. But the agency insisted that £10bn of income from generating and fuel reprocessing plants should also be taken into account.
PARIS (AFP) — Newly formed global energy giant GDF Suez of France is interested in nuclear power operator British Energy but only if the company is split up and sold off site by site.
"If the plan remains to sell British Energy in one go, then it will be sold without us," said GDF Suez head Gerard Mestrallet in an interview with Les Echos daily to appear Thursday.
