MADRID, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Spain's 1,000-megawatt Cofrentes nuclear plant was halted on Friday for maintenance work while power was being stepped down at the 1,000-MW Asco II plant prior to refuelling, operators and technicians said.
That leaves just five of Spain's eight nuclear power plants working normally, as the 1,000 MW Vandellos II plant has been halted almost continually for two months.
BEIJING, Oct 24 (Reuters) - South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said on Friday that Poland had asked South Korea for help in building its first nuclear power plants by 2012, but Warsaw later said it had not mentioned a firm deadline.
Following a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Lee said in a statement that Warsaw had asked for Seoul's "strong interest and participation" in constructing two or three nuclear power plants as well as a 440 million euro ($570 million) liquified natural gas project.
24 October 2008 Skopje _ In the following three months Skopje will decide whether to take part in the construction of the Bulgarian nuclear power plant at Belene that could solve Macedonia´s power shortages in the future.
Macedonia´s deputy prime minister Zoran Stavreski who recently visited Belene said this Friday in his column in the local daily Dnevnik that Macedonia "would participate by financing the project with a certain amount of money. In return, the country would receive part of the electricity produced".
The construction of Bulgaria's second NPP in Belene (the Danube) turned out to be the apple of discord in the energy giant RWE, reported the German Die Welt. The RWE were short-listed as the NPP strategic investor. The company CEO, Jurgen Grossmann plans the company's participation in the project despite the resistance of RWE Supervisory Board.
Platts - The US, France and Japan are working to put international mechanisms into place to help finance construction of nuclear power plants in the US and elsewhere, government officials and financial analysts said this month.
Two principal targets are international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and national export credit agencies, the sources said.
MOSCOW, October 21 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will discuss trade, energy and conflict in the South Caucasus with his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargisyan, at talks in Armenia on October 21, a Kremlin official said.
Bilateral trade grew 13%, year-on-year, in the first eight months of 2008 to reach $536.5 million, the Kremlin said earlier. Russia is a leading trade partner of Armenia and is one of the biggest investors in the country's economy, with accrued investment from Russia topping $1.6 billion from 1991 to July 1, 2008.
VIENNA (Reuters) - Czech power firm CEZ will file for an environmental impact assessment (EIA) of a new unit at its Dukovany nuclear power station in weeks, CEZ sales chief Alan Svoboda said on Tuesday.
CEZ already filed a request to add two units at its Temelin plant earlier this year as it prepares to renew and expand its nuclear portfolio.
The consortium of the Energiewerke Nord GmbH (EWN), Sintagma UAB and Ernst & Young Baltic UAB successfully completed in September 2008 the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) decommissioning management system and database (DMSD) project.
The joint team with subcontractors IBM and CORE2 provided all services according to the project schedule of 14 months. Beside the delivery of a comprehensive set of different IT equipment, an enlarged training of nominated INPP staff was performed. The project was financed by the International Ignalina Decommissioning Support Fund managed by the Central Project Management Agency with the overall value of 3.5 million EUR.
Estonia has completed the decade-long clean-up of one of Europe's most hazardous radioactive waste dumps on the Baltic coast, an official in charge of the operation said Monday.
"EU experts considered the radioactive waste storage at Sillamae one of the four most dangerous sites of its kind in Europe," Tonis Kaasik, director of the OkoSil firm responsible for the clean-up of the Soviet-era dump told AFP.
Aleksandras Abisala, chief negotiator over the extension of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, who used to speak about the considerable growth of the possibility to reach an agreement on the extension of the operation of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, now claims that Lithuania has lost this fight.
After the last week"s European Council in Brussels, when the hopes concerning the extension of the operation of the Ignalina nuclear power plant diminished, Abisala admits that Lithuania has lost the fight, lrt.lt writes.
