Nuclear power in Europe

Enel SpA’s nuclear power plant expansion in Slovakia is at risk unless the east European country’s government “quickly” approves a plan to increase financing for the project, the company’s Slovak unit said.

Works at two additional reactors at the Mochovce site operated by Enel’s Slovenske Elektrarne AS may be halted unless its owners agree to boost spending by 800 million euros ($1.03 billion), Jana Burdova, a spokeswoman for the company, in which Enel has 66 percent, said in an e-mailed statement today. The project’s “complexity and a need to meet the latest safety standards” boosted building costs.

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.

Russia is proposing to build a high-voltage electricity cable from Kaliningrad to Germany across the Baltic Sea to export power produced from a newly to be built nuclear power plant. The cable would be laid alongside the last part of the gas pipeline Nordstream that Gazprom is building together with western partners and that will be used to transport gas direct from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The electricity cable would similarly bypass third countries, in this case Poland. A representative from the German Ministry of Economic Affairs says he does not expect Germany to be willing to acquiesce to the plan. ‘I cannot imagine that the German public will want to import nuclear power (“Atomstrom”) from Russia’, he says.

Italian utilities company Enel will decide on its involvement in the nuclear project company, set up by the Romanian state with major European partners to complete the 3rd and the 4th reactors of Cernavoda nuclear plant, when the reforms in the power generation sector become predictable. The decision depends critically on the alteration of the market regulations besides the setting up of the two state power companies in the generation sector, Enel officials told Bloomberg agency quoted by local media.