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.
The Finnish power group Fennovoima has selected the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom to build its nuclear reactor in Pyhäjoki, northern Finland.
Fennovoima said on Tuesday that it will propose to its shareholders that a deal with Rosatom be signed by the end of this year, with the Russian firm taking a 34 percent stake in the project.
Slovakia’s nuclear watchdog violated the law when it issued a building permit for Enel SpA’s 3.7 billion-euro ($5 billion) nuclear project because Greenpeace wasn’t allowed to comment, the Supreme Court ruled.
The Italian utility’s local unit, Slovenske Elektrarne AS, in 2009 began building two new reactors at the Mochovce nuclear power plant after receiving a permit by the Office for Nuclear Supervision. The high court asked the regulator to repeat the proceeding and include Greenpeace, according to the June 27 ruling posted on the office’s website today.
Areva SA (AREVA), the world’s biggest supplier of nuclear fuel and services, is monitoring the planned sale of uranium enricher Urenco Ltd. and said it won’t endanger its finances to take part in a potential bid.
“We definitively monitor closely the situation,” Areva Chief Financial Officer Pierre Aubouin said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “But we wouldn’t be doing anything that would hurt our balance sheet.”
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.
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.
A project costed in billions of euros to expand a Czech nuclear plant has been undermined by the effects on energy prices of the shale gas revolution in North America, and is splitting the government.
Several politicians are echoing experts who say that the tender process for the huge contract should be delayed or abandoned.
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.
After a freighter went up in flames at the start of the month while carrying radioactive material into Hamburg's harbour, it has emerged that the German port city receives such hazardous cargo up to seven times a month.
Fire fighters said they had only narrowly been able to prevent a catastrophe on May 1st when the freighter "Atlantic Cartier" caught fire - complete with its radioactive load.
