British Gas owner Centrica is expected to write off £200m when it pulls out of the country's nuclear new build programme in the new year.
Centrica has the option of taking a 20 per cent stake in building nuclear power stations at Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk alongside French group EDF.
The Government is planning to write a "blank cheque" to the nuclear industry by underwriting the cost of new power stations, leading energy academics have claimed in a letter to The Independent.
Under a major policy U-turn being considered by ministers, the taxpayer would be left to cover the cost of budget over-runs or building delays at new nuclear plants. Costly setbacks are almost inevitable with such complex construction projects.
British Energy said Wednesday that output from its 15 nuclear reactors reached 3.5 TWh in August, up 3% from July, following the restart of the UK generator's Dungeness B-21 reactor on August 19.
The 550 MW Dungeness B-21 unit in Kent generated power for the first time in a year in August, following an extended outage to repair a pipe adjacent to a boiler reheater.
A fire inside a nuclear power station took firefighters seven hours to extinguish yesterday.
Emergency plans were put into effect as more than 45 firemen tackled the blaze at the Sizewell B station near Leiston, Suffolk.
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.
A COMMUNITY watchdog group is calling for more information about a German study which suggests that there are clusters of childhood leukaemia cases near nuclear power station sites.
The Sizewell Stakeholder Group - set up to improve liaison between the nuclear site, the local community and regulators - wants to know if there is any UK implication.
ENVIRONMENT Agency bosses have decided not to prosecute the operator of Sizewell A over an incident which saw thousands of gallons of water contaminated when radioactivity escaped into the North Sea.
The incident, in January 2007, involved the fracture of a plastic pipe in a cooling pond building where highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored under water prior to their despatch to the Sellafield reprocessing works in Cumbria.
LONDON, Nov 10 (Reuters) - The B2 turbine at British Energy's Sizewell nuclear power plant was offline on Monday morning, a website operated by the National Grid showed.
The unit in southeast England has capacity of 594 MW.
POLICE officers who are called to protests outside Suffolk's nuclear power station will receive specialised training and equipment courtesy of those who own the reactor.
British Energy has given £10,000 to the county's police force to help them remove campaigners from the site at Sizewell.
Vincent de Rivaz, the chief executive of France's EDF Energy, which is now in control of the UK's nuclear energy programme, doesn't laugh when I ask if he has succeeded where Napoleon failed.
"It's not a war," he says, very seriously. "This is an amicable agreement between two companies which will bring good news to everyone involved. Will it bring stability to customers for electricity bills? Yes. Will it bring new jobs? Yes. Will it improve climate change? Yes."
