Nuclear power in Europe

A narrow majority of the Greenlandic parliament passed a measure to overturn the country's ban on uranium mining.

By the slimmest of margins, Greenland’s parliament has passed a measure to overturn the country’s ban on uranium mining. Coalition partners Siumut and Atassut secured 15 votes in favour of the measure to end the ban, implemented in 1988. Fourteen voted against. Speaking in favour of overturning the ban, Greenland’s premier, Aleqa Hammond, said it was a matter of economic priorities.

A top-secret plant at Aldermaston that makes enriched uranium components for Britain's nuclear warheads and fuel for the Royal Navy's submarines has been shut down because corrosion has been discovered in its "structural steelwork", the Guardian can reveal.

The closure has been endorsed by safety regulators who feared the building did not conform to the appropriate standards. The nuclear safety watchdog demands that such critical buildings are capable of withstanding "extreme weather and seismic events", and the plant at Aldermaston failed this test.

For the past 40 years, the French state-owned company Areva has been mining uranium for Europe's nuclear power needs in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth. One local activist is taking on the company, claiming that water and dust have been contaminated and workers are dying as a result of its activities.

The French nuclear industry is in turmoil as uranium supplies have dried up and the treatment of spent fuel has been blocked amid an increasingly bitter row between the heads of its two main state operators.

EDF, the electricity group that runs 58 reactors in France, said that Areva, the nuclear energy group, had stopped uranium deliveries on January 4 and was refusing to take away spent fuel for reprocessing.