LONDON (Reuters) - British Energy's Hunterston B7 nuclear reactor was shutdown manually late on Tuesday but it is still unclear why the reactor in Scotland needed to be stopped, a spokesman for the company said.
"We are still looking into that," he said on Wednesday.
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".
People living near a former RAF base yesterday spoke of their shock at being told their homes could be radioactive.
Radium and asbestos have been found at the site, where military waste was burned and buried. The council is now testing 90 nearby homes.
The risk of a nuclear disaster is still as high as initially predicted should an aircraft from Lydd Airport crash into the Dungeness power station.
After reviewing Lydd Airport’s second round of environmental information Lydd Airport Action Group’s (LAAG’s) nuclear safety advisor still thinks the risk is substantial.
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.
Alarm systems at a nuclear weapons site were down for ten days after heavy flooding, leaving residents vulnerable to a potential accident.
A report said electricity to "virtually the whole of" the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) site at Burghfield, Berkshire, was switched off when it was flooded during torrential rain on July 20 last year.
Campaign group Nuclear Information Service (NIS) said it was fortunate that staff had gone home for the weekend by the time the water peaked so no radioactive material was in use in the assembly area
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.
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 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.
Robots will soon begin dismantling the plant which gave Dounreay the title of being the world's nuclear dustbin.
Workers are currently drilling through the concrete that surrounds the uranium fuel reprocessing plant which was to receive spent nuclear fuel from reactors around the world, with the waste being stored at the Caithness facility for up to 25 years; a facility that outraged environmentalists.
