(Reuters) - The storm that swept across southern Britain on Monday morning caused nuclear power outages at the Dungeness B21 and B22 units, operator EDF Energy said.
EDF Energy said on its website that both units, which have a capacity of 550 megawatts (MW) each, came off at 0744 GMT on Monday, adding that unit availability was expected to be zero for the next seven days.
"The shutdown was weather-related. The plant reacted as it should and shut down safely," an EDF Energy spokeswoman said.
AFP - The European Commission said Tuesday it would examine British government support for a massive 19-billion-euro nuclear plant to be built by French and Chinese firms.
London announced Monday plans for two reactors to be built by French energy giant EDF, backed by the world's leading nuclear power company, Areva of France, and Chinese nuclear firms CGN and CNNC.
LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) - Britain is set to sign a deal with France's EDF for the first nuclear plant to start construction in Europe since Japan's Fukushima disaster raised safety concerns worldwide, at a cost estimated at around $23 billion.
Under the deal, expected to be announced on Monday, the French utility will lead a consortium, including a Chinese group, to construct two European Pressurised Water Reactors (EPRs) designed by France's Areva.
With a deal over subsidies now weeks away, Emily Gosden looks back at the tortuous path to this point and the challenges that remain.
Ed Davey was adamant. He had never given a “day-by-day or week-by-week account” of the negotiations with EDF, and nor was he about to start — no matter how much the assembled journalists wanted to know whether a deal to build Britain’s first reactor in a generation would finally be agreed in the few weeks before the energy firm’s end-of-year deadline.
PARIS--France's oldest nuclear plant Fessenheim, in the east of the country bordering Germany, won't be dismantled until 2018 at the earliest due to the plant's lengthy closing procedures, the French government mediator for the shut down of Fessenheim Francis Rol-Tanguy said in an interview with French daily Les Dernieres Nouvelles d'Alsace.
The closing of Fessenheim is seen as a litmus test for French President Francois Hollande's ability to reform the country's strategy on energy which heavily relies on its nuclear capacities. By law only the operator of a power plant or France's nuclear regulator can decide to shut down a reactor.
Electricite de France SA’s deal with the U.K. to build the nation’s first new nuclear plant in two decades will be probed by the European Union once an agreement is struck and regulators are informed, the EU’s antitrust chief said.
“The U.K. government has announced to us that they will notify in the coming months a program linked with investments in nuclear energy, in new plants,” Joaquin Almunia, the EU’s competition commissioner, said in the margins of a conference in Florence, Italy. “Once this notification will take place we will need to assess if this scheme, this program complies or not” with the EU’s rules.
ED DAVEY, the energy secretary, will travel to Beijing this month to lay the groundwork for a sweeping new partnership that could lead to Chinese-designed nuclear reactors being built in Britain.
The trip is the latest sign of the government's desperation to find backers for its troubled £200bn low-carbon overhaul of the energy industry. Last week Michael Fallon, Davey's No2, signed a memorandum of understanding to co-operate on civil power with Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear monopoly.
More than 20 Greenpeace activists climbed fences to break into an EDF nuclear power plant in southern France and demanded its closure, the environmental campaign group has said.
The activists, dressed in red, broke into the Tricastin plant at dusk on Sunday and unfurled a yellow and black banner on the wall with the words: "Tricastin, nuclear accident – president of the catastrophe?" above a picture of the president, François Hollande.
As the FT reported on Friday, negotiations on the terms for new nuclear have advanced and there is increasing optimism that a deal can be done. The meeting between David Cameron and Francois Hollande in Paris two weeks ago amounted to a declaration of agreement in principle. Just three issues remain to be resolved.
EDF Energy has been forced to halt both reactors at its 1,280 megawatt (MW) Torness nuclear plant near Edinburgh after a rising tide of seaweed threatened to clog its cooling system.
