It is one thing for a green pressure group to claim nuclear power is too expensive, but quite another when the charge comes from the head of an atomic industry pioneer such as General Electric.
GE built some of the world's first commercial atomic reactors in the 1950s and has remained an industry leader since its nuclear joint venture with Japan's Hitachi in 2007.
Government negotiations with French energy giant EDF over subsidies for new nuclear power are being conducted in “a smoke-filled room”, the chief executive of rival company SSE claimed yesterday.
Ian Marchant attacked the lack of transparency in the talks as he warned MPs on the energy select committee that ministers’ plans to reform the energy sector were so complex and risky as to leave consumers “paying a higher price”.
China appears to be edging ahead in the international contest to build a new nuclear power station on Turkey’s Black Sea coast – a sign of how the ambitions of its nuclear companies are poised to reshape the global nuclear industry.
Beijing is not looking for government guarantees for the project and can supply its own financing, according to an Ankara official, pointing to China’s advantage in the race to build the reactor for Turkey.
Government plans for nuclear power risk handing control of the UK's climate and energy policies to France, according to four senior environmentalists.
Energy giant EDF and reactor builder Areva, big players in the UK's plans, are largely French government-owned.
Jonathan Porritt, Tom Burke, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper say the firms are landing UK citizens with all the financial risks of nuclear new build.
They have told Prime Minister David Cameron he is being badly advised.
PARIS, Feb 10 (Reuters) - French weekend prices jumped early on Friday as a second unplanned nuclear outage within 12 hours caused panic in the market about a supply shortage, but prices for next week were steady as warmer weather was expected to ease demand pressure.
French baseload power for Saturday delivery traded nearly twice as high as in the neighbouring German market at 100.00 euros, after EDF's 1,300 Cattenom 2 nuclear reactor went offline unexpectedly overnight, tightening supply margins already under strain from high winter demand.
Having spent five years combining its nuclear power, engineering and research enterprises into the single entity of Rosatom, the Russian government now sees privatisation of the firm as part of a plan for industrial modernisation.
Rosatom is just one of several vertically integrated state holding companies Russia established to "discourage the decline of the more intellectual sectors of national industry" in the post-Soviet era, wrote Vladimir Putin in the Vedomosti newspaper on 30 January.
PARIS—France's nuclear-safety watchdog ordered immediate upgrades to nuclear reactors to guard against natural disasters, which Électricité de France SA said could require €10 billion, or roughly $13 billion, in additional costs.
In a review following last year's Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire concluded that no plants needed to be shut down immediately but that steps should be taken as "soon as possible" to improve safety at France's 58 reactors.
PARIS — One person was killed and four were injured Monday afternoon in an explosion at a nuclear waste treatment site in southern France, according to the French Nuclear Safety Authority.
The authority and local police officials said there had been no radiation leak. About five hours after the explosion, the authority announced that the episode was over. The site, about 20 miles from Avignon, has no nuclear reactors, the authority said. A spokesman for the French power utility Électricité de France, which owns the site, said, “It is an industrial accident, not a nuclear one.”
The Mox nuclear fuel plant at Sellafield was closed on Wednesday, with the loss of around 600 jobs.
The closure is a consequence of the Fukushima incident in Japan in March, which has closed down much of the nuclear industry there and led to a rethink of nuclear power around the world. But the government said the move had "no implications" for the UK's plans for new nuclear reactors.
PARIS, July 20 (Reuters) - EDF has delayed the completion of its first French next-generation EPR nuclear reactor by another two years to 2016, saying it expects the project's costs to rise to 6 billion euros ($8.52 billion).
In July 2010, the state-controlled utility had delayed the commercial start of the 1,600 megawatt nuclear reactor by two years to 2014. It had also previously raised its cost estimate for the project in northern France by almost 2 billion euros to 5 billion euros.
