German energy companies are short of as much as 30 billion euros ($34 billion) of the money they need to set aside to build a safe disposal site for nuclear waste as part of the country's exit from nuclear power, Spiegel Online reported on Monday.
E.ON, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall are due to switch off their nuclear plants by a 2022 deadline set by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
Plans for a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point are in doubt after EDF experienced setbacks with the technology in France
EDF, the French state-owned power company, can point to one big advantage of the nuclear power station it intends to build at Hinkley Point in south-west England. Once fired up, the plant's reactors will churn out electricity at a steady price, unmoved by volatility in wholesale gas prices.
France’s nuclear safety authority won’t decide until early next year whether a key piece of equipment on a nuclear reactor being built by Electricite de France SA in Normandy is safe or needs to be changed, the regulator said.
“I don’t see us making a decision or taking a position before the beginning of 2016,” Pierre-Franck Chevet, president of Autorite de Surete Nucleaire, told a hearing at the French Senate Tuesday. The finding could range from rejecting the equipment as unsafe to allowing its use under certain conditions, he said.
OSLO, June 23 (Reuters) - Sweden's OKG, a part of E.ON group, said on Tuesday it would decide in the third-quarter whether to permanently shut down two nuclear reactors at its Oskarshamn plant in Sweden.
"E.ON has informed of its intention as majority owner of OKG AB to pursue a direction to permanently discontinue electricity production at OKG unit 2 as soon as possible," OKG said in a market message.
The 638-megawatt reactor has been offline since May 2013 and may never restart if OKG board
Hungarian tabloid Blikk reported on Saturday that one of the MVM Paks II Zrt manager’s laptop and several data storage devices had been stolen from a car which was broken into. The data related to plans for the expansion of Hungary’s sole nuclear plant, the paper said.
According to Blikk, the incident took place in Budapest as far back as May. The executive, whose identity has not been released, left the vehicle at the Belgrad rakpart embankment for a brief meeting. While the Paks director was gone, the robbers stole a bag containing the notebook and several external drives from the back seat of the car.
Builders of the U.K.’s first nuclear plant in two decades are about to take a vital component and break it.
The 110-ton spherical steel lid was destined to sit atop a reactor at the Hinkley Point site in Somerset. Instead it will be sacrificed to test the strength of a part already welded in place at similar atomic projects in France and China.
The tests are essential after regulators found potential weaknesses in the steel used to contain radiation. The results may derail countries’ nuclear programs that are relying on the EPR reactors. They also threaten a generation of atomic plants that developer Areva SA has billed as the world’s safest.
Cheap gas and new technology make the Hinkley Point power plant look expensive
David Cameron is about to sign you up to pay for one of the most expensive man-made objects in the world.
The proposed nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset will cost an estimated £24.5bn, take a decade to construct, and tie British households into an astonishingly expensive electricity subsidies until 2060.
Croatia's environment minister Mihael Zmajlovic said that the government will respond to Bosnia's inquiry on a planned disposal of radioactive waste at the site Trgovska gora, Minister Zmajlovic said that the development of a strategic environmental impact assessment for the national program for the implementation of the strategy for disposal of radioactive waste and used nuclear fuel didn't start, and neither did the development of the national program.
In a letter to Bosnian minister of foreign trade and economic relations, Mirko Sarovic, minister Zmajlovic wrote that once the strategic environmental impact assessment near the border with Bosnia, once the national strategy is passed is launched, the cross-border consultations will be conducted within the framework of existing international instruments. He added that Croatia will fully respect the provisions of the Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment together with the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in Trans-border matters (Espoo Convention.
Local communities in Bosnia - and in Croatia - are uniting in opposition to a Croatian government plan to construct a radioactive waste disposal site in a pristine natural environment.
A long-ignored local environmental issue is threatening to become a major political headache for Bosnia’s leaders, as well as a point of dispute with neighbouring Croatia.
Hungary said Monday that the EU's nuclear body Euratom has signed a fuel supply agreement, clearing the way for Russia to build the extension of the country's sole nuclear plant.
Under the deal -- agreed with Euratom at the end of March -- Russia will be able to supply fuel for two new reactors at the Paks plant in central Hungary over a 10-year period.
