PARIS — Anti-nuclear groups have filed a court complaint against French utility EDF for under-reporting an incident at its Fessenheim plant near the German border, they said on Tuesday.
On Feb. 28, EDF stopped one of two nuclear reactors at the Fessenheim plant for an unplanned outage, citing "a lack of watertightness" on some piping outside the nuclear zone. It said there had been no safety or environmental impact.
A “very serious” fault has been discovered in a French nuclear power station which is at the heart of David Cameron’s strategy to “keep the lights on” in Britain in the next decade.
The future of two nuclear reactors planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset has been thrown into doubt by the discovery of a potentially catastrophic mistake in the construction of an identical EPR power plant in Normandy.
An official of Russian state nuclear firm Rosatom told a Brussels audience that his company could guarantee a levelized price for electricity of $50/MWh from new nuclear plants it builds, if the client chooses the firm's services for their lifecycle. According to EU policies, however, fuel supply should be diversified.
Speaking at an event organised by New Nuclear Watch Europe, Kirill Komarov, First Deputy CEO of Rosatom, said that his company was the only one able to guarantee a low price for electricity, if European countries chose the full package of its services.
Luxembourg has confirmed that it will back Austria in filing a lawsuit against the European Commission for the decision to allow billions of pounds of subsidies for Hinkley Point C, casting fresh doubt over the UK’s first planned nuclear reactors in 20 years.
Monique Clement, Private Secretary at Luxembourg’s Department of the Environment told Power Engineering International, “Yes we are going to follow Austria. That’s the decision of the Luxembourg government.”
Asked what the rationale was for Luxembourg’s opposition, the spokesperson was not forthcoming.
ESSEN, Germany, March 10 (Reuters) - A sale of uranium enrichment company Urenco won't happen before the second half of 2015, RWE Chief Executive Peter Terium said, adding that a disposal could even take longer than that.
RWE and peer E.ON jointly hold one third of Urenco's shares, with the Dutch and British governments each owning a third, too.
Terium said the stake in Urenco was the last major item on the company's list of disposals.
(Reuters) - Using taxpayers' money to fund nuclear power is "absolutely out of the question", German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Thursday, in an apparent swipe at British plans to finance new atomic generation.
Gabriel was arriving for talks in Brussels on the European Commission's proposal for an energy union, which would deepen cross-border cooperation on energy across the 28-member EU.
Previous efforts to harmonize energy policy have faltered as member states have jealously guarded their right to decide on the kind of energy they use.
Areva, the French nuclear group, on Monday issued its fifth profit warning in seven months, saying it expected to report a €4.9bn loss for 2014 as cost overruns ballooned on key European projects.
The annual net loss - due to be the largest the state-controlled group has ever recorded - comes as Areva works with the French government on the details of a state-backed rescue package, according to people familiar with the situation.
Hungary’s deal to award up to €12bn in nuclear power contracts to a Russian state-owned company is facing a growing threat from EU regulators who have the power to block the project.
A veto or prohibitive fine from Brussels would be a bruising setback for Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, who has made the project the centrepiece of his strategy to forge deeper political and economic ties with Russia, despite the ostracising of Moscow by the west over Ukraine.
PARIS, Jan 13 (Reuters) - France should build a new generation of nuclear reactors to replace the country's ageing plants, Energy Minister Segolene Royal said on Tuesday, the first time a government member has clearly approved this option.
France, the country most reliant on nuclear power, must decide in the next few years whether to continue down the nuclear route as about half of its 58 reactors will reach their designed 40-year age limit in the 2020s.
UK ministers are warning their Austrian counterparts that an arsenal of retaliatory measures will be launched if Vienna goes ahead with plans to challenge an EU state aid decision approving subsidies for new nuclear reactors at Hinkley point in Somerset.
A diplomatic cable from the Austrian embassy in London to Vienna, seen by the Guardian, says that the Foreign Office’s Europe director, Vijay Rangarajan, conveyed a message that “the UK will take in the future every opportunity to sue or damage Austria in areas that have strong internal political effects,” unless the lawsuit was dropped.
