By Sami Torma
HELSINKI, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Finland is pressing ahead with construction of its fifth nuclear reactor but the plant has faced long delays and seems unlikely to herald a quick revival of Europe's atomic industry.
Construction of the reactor -- one of only two major atomic projects underway in largely nuclear-sceptical Western Europe -- was originally scheduled to start in 2009 but construction delays and rising costs have now pushed that back to 2011.
By Alan Katz, Bloomberg News, September 6, 2007
Martin Landtman hunched forward in his shirtsleeves as a June storm on Finland's Baltic coast drenched the construction site of the world's most powerful nuclear reactor. As project manager for TVO, the joint venture buying the plant, Landtman has weathered far worse annoyances than rain.
Flawed welds for the reactor's steel liner, unusable coolant pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation already have pushed back the delivery date of the Olkiluoto-3 unit by at least two years.
(By Dana Spinant) One of Finland’s most unlikely tourist attractions is Olkiluoto, a small island off the west coast, which is home to the first nuclear reactor being built in Europe in more than a decade.
EUOBSERVER / CLIMATE TECHNOLOGY - For the millions of Europeans who mistrust nuclear power, it may cause goose-pimples to think that at least six new plants will soon join the 152 reactors already fizzing away on EU soil. But despite fresh talk of how nuclear can cut CO2, the industry is still struggling to get over the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
A visitor to a typical reactor could be convinced the atom is a magic key to the EU's energy woes: standing on the core, just 10 metres under one's feet, splitting uranium atoms generate enough power (1,100 MW) to light up all the homes in Finland for a year. There is no sound. There is no smell. As you leave, a scanning machine says "You have not been contaminated."
By Philip Bethge (Der Spiegel)
Is nuclear power on the verge of a renaissance? Its supporters argue that atomic energy is the only way to satisfy humanity’s hunger for more energy without aggravating the effects of global warming. Critics, however, regard the nuclear hype as over-simplistic optimism fueled by an industry in distress.
The concentration of market power increased to "critical" levels in a number of European regions between 1996 and 2005, according to a new study published by the German Institute for Applied Ecology.
The study considered typical measures of market concentration and said "two very different development patterns" had emerged over the period. Market concentration in the UK and Scandinavia were now "un-concentrated", but concentration remained "very high" in other regions, notably Germany.
