(Reuters) - Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have asked prospective buyers for their jointly-owned nuclear fuel enrichment firm Urenco to submit indicative bids by year-end, sources familiar with the process said.
The governments, which each own a third of Urenco, have agreed to test the market's appetite for the world's second-largest nuclear fuel vendor before deciding whether to kick-start a privatisation process that could fetch up to 10 billion euros ($13 billion), said the sources.
More than five years of international intrigue ended with a whimper on April 10th as ČEZ, a Czech utility company, officially cancelled the planned expansion of the Temelín nuclear power plant, 120 km south of Prague in the South Bohemia region. The project was undone by a fall in electricity prices and the spectre of a botched state energy scheme in years past.
PRAGUE, April 9 (Reuters) - A tender for the $10-15 billion expansion of the Czech Republic's Temelin nuclear power plant should be wound down and replaced with a new contest with more bidders, President Milos Zeman said on Wednesday.
The plan to build two reactors at the site has been undermined by falling power prices and the government's unwillingness to provide price guarantees to Temelin's owner, CEZ, which is majority-owned by the state.
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Toshiba Corp. is weighing plans to bid for Urenco, the nuclear fuel producer backed by the U.K., the Netherlands and two German energy giants, the Sunday Times reports without citing sources.
The newspaper says the Japanese industrial giant, which owns the nuclear reactor builder Westinghouse Electric, wants to bid for the business if and when it comes on the market.
Urenco, which enriches uranium for nuclear fuel, is owned by the U.K. and Dutch governments and German firms RWE A.G. and E.ON S.E., who own a third each.
In a shock announcement, Czech power company CEZ on Friday excluded France’s Areva from its multi-billion-euro tender to expand the Temelin nuclear power plant for failing to fulfill all the requirements, leaving Toshiba’s US unit Westinghouse and a consortium led by Russia’s Atomstroyexport as the two remaining bidders.
British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.
Poland will commission its first nuclear power plant in 2022, two years after the original schedule, Hanna Trojanowska, the government's nuclear energy adviser, said Thursday.
"In effect, in the verified schedule 2022 appears as the date for the start-up of the first unit," Trojanowska told the state news agency PAP.
Major setback for energy plans as report finds flaws in US and French models
KIEV, Oct. 7 – The general contractor to build reactors three and four at the Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant will be Russia's ZAO Atomstroiexport, a source in the Fuel and Energy Ministry told Interfax-Ukraine.
"The interagency tender commission on the selection of the type of generating units for reactors three and four at the Khmelnytsky NPP has finished its work. After studying proposals from Atomstroiexport, South Koera's ÊÅÐÑÎ and U.S. company Westinghouse, the commission said that the Russian project was the best," the source said.
KAMENOGORSK, Kazakhstan — The flame-licked doors of a hydrogen furnace clattered open at a Cold War-era bomb factory in Kazakhstan's Ural Mountains, spilling a tray of baked metal capsules into the pale winter light. Each enriched-uranium pellet the size of a Brazil nut packs almost as much energy as a ton of coal.
