Nuclear power in Europe

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.

A malfunctioning transformer led to an unintentional shutdown of the emergency power system of an offline nuclear plant in northern Germany which had been the scene of numerous glitches in the past, press reports said Thursday.

The cause of the breakdown was a defect electronic card but it did not have any impact on the operations of the plant, said the operator of the Brunsbuettel nuclear reactor which has been deactivated since the summer of 2007.

STOCKHOLM, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Vattenfall Chief Executive Lars Josefsson said on Thursday he was not prepared to estimate when the Brunsbuettel and Kruemmel nuclear plants in Germany would come back on line.

Josefsson told a conference call on Vattenfall's 2007 results he was "not prepared to give any estimation" on when the plants, jointly owned with E.ON, would come back on line.

FRANKFURT, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Germany will uphold staunch political opposition to atomic energy, unperturbed by the mood swinging back in favour of nuclear power elsewhere.

Oil at record highs, climate worries, and the need to cut dependency on energy imports is due to move the British government to back new nuclear power plants on Thursday.

But Germany, Europe's biggest and most central power market, will not follow suit.