Nuclear power in Europe

Areva is weighing whether to bring out cheaper, less sophisticated nuclear reactors after its flagship EPR lost out to a low-cost South Korean rival in one of the biggest civil tenders last year.

Top management at the French group last week launched a review of its product range to determine whether Areva should reintroduce the simpler second-generation CPR1,000 reactors - which it stopped building 20 years ago - for client countries that are new to nuclear power.

The world is running out of uranium and nobody seems to have noticed.

The executives of electric utilities worldwide are dreaming of a renaissance in nuclear power. But problems with a new, state-of-the-art reactor in Finland suggest that this is unlikely to happen. The industry's alternative strategy is to modernize older plants to drastically extend reactor lifetimes.

The managers at Finnish electric utility TVO expressed one last wish before ordering what would be the world's largest nuclear power plant from Siemens and the French nuclear power conglomerate Areva. They wanted the reactor to be painted oxblood red and white, the traditional colors of the picturesque summer homes on Finland's western coast.

A nuclear leak, which could have caused a major disaster, was only averted by a chance decision to wash some dirty clothes, according to a newly obtained official report.

On the morning of Sunday 7 January 2007, one of the contractors working on decommissioning the Sizewell A nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast was in the laundry room when he noticed cooling water leaking on to the floor from the pond that holds the reactor's highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.