The complex job of cleaning up Britain’s dirtiest nuclear site is drawing some of the world’s biggest engineering companies to the poorest corner of north-west England, but local companies are wondering how they will fare in the fight for lucrative contracts.
Sellafield, in Cumbria, is the biggest prize currently available in nuclear decommissioning, with decades of work to undo the problems caused by 50 years of atomic research.
A malfunctioning transformer led to an unintentional shutdown of the emergency power system of an offline nuclear plant in northern Germany which had been the scene of numerous glitches in the past, press reports said Thursday.
The cause of the breakdown was a defect electronic card but it did not have any impact on the operations of the plant, said the operator of the Brunsbuettel nuclear reactor which has been deactivated since the summer of 2007.
MADRID, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Spain's opposition Popular Party, narrowly trailing the ruling Socialists before March elections, would prolong the working life of existing nuclear power stations but build no new ones, a spokesman said.
Although nuclear power is back on the table in many countries after years of unpopularity, neither of Spain's major parties is calling for new plants ahead of March 9 elections.
"Unless there is a different general consensus, which I doubt, we propose no new emplacement of nuclear plants," Jose Folgado, member of parliament and secretary of state for energy with the last Popular Party government, told Reuters.
Companies building nuclear reactors in the UK will have to meet the full cost of their future closure and clean-up, setting money aside from day one, the government will say on Friday.
Following on from last month’s white paper on nuclear power, the government will on Friday set out the draft framework for how the decommissioning of new nuclear reactors would be paid for.
Several companies, including British Energy, EDF, Eon, RWE and Centrica, are looking at building reactors but have said they want more certainty on a range of issues before they are ready to invest, including decommissioning costs and the disposal of radioactive waste.
The Government is concerned that a lack of competition in the UK nuclear industry threatens to distort decision-making in the race to build a new generation of nuclear power plants.
In an interview with The Times, Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said the Government would look critically at British Energy’s ownership of eight of the most attractive UK sites for new reactors. “We want to see proper competition here,” he said. “We don’t want to see some sort of cagey deal between one company and another company . . . We have got to facilitate proper competition.”
MURMANSK, February 21 (RIA Novosti) - Norway is to provide 58 million rubles ($2.4 million) for the overhaul of a nuclear waste storage facility in northern Russia, a spokesman for the Murmansk Region governor said on Thursday.
The plan was announced during a meeting between Governor Yury Yevdokimov and the governor of Norway's Finnmark county, Gunnar Kjonnoy, in Kirkenes, a Norwegian town near the Russian border.
ENDS Europe DAILY 2489, 21/02/08
Austria is threatening to veto an EU resolution on a proposed plan to boost low-carbon technologies in Europe unless the bloc's 27 energy ministers agree nuclear research should not receive any extra EU funds, it emerged on Wednesday.
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP): Turkey on Thursday delayed the opening of a tender for the construction of the country's first nuclear power plant.
The energy ministry was waiting for a government audit agency to comment on the tender's technical details before potential bidders could be invited, state-run media said. Officials said earlier but it was not clear how long the delay would be.
Bulgaria's planned nuclear power plant at Belene on the Danube River posed a risk to Romania's energy security, a top aide to Romanian president Traian Basescu said, as quoted by Romanian daily Business Standard on February 20 2008.
LONDON, Feb 21 (Reuters) - British Energy's Torness-2 nuclear power reactor stopped just after midnight on Thursday and the shutdown was unplanned, a spokeswoman for the company said.
"We are working on the restart plan," she said on Thursday. "But we will do some additional maintenance work while the unit is off."
She would not say what had caused the 625-MW reactor, one of two at the power plant in Scotland, to stop. (Reporting by Daniel Fineren)
