Electrabel has reacted strongly against a plan from the Belgian government to force a one-off payment of €250 million ($338 million) from nuclear power generators.
The company's parent group, GdF-Suez has told the Belgian government that it "emphatically protests" a draft of new legislation which requires nuclear operators - and nuclear operators only - to make a "contribution" of €250 million to government coffers for the 2008 financial year.
The risk of a nuclear disaster is still as high as initially predicted should an aircraft from Lydd Airport crash into the Dungeness power station.
After reviewing Lydd Airport’s second round of environmental information Lydd Airport Action Group’s (LAAG’s) nuclear safety advisor still thinks the risk is substantial.
WARSAW - Poland hopes to reduce its heavy reliance on coal, which produces harmful greenhouse gases, by building a few nuclear power plants by 2030, Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Waldemar Pawlak said on Thursday.
Pawlak's ministry is currently working on a new energy strategy designed to meet the Polish economy's booming demand for electricity and to modernize its communist-era power plants.
Ecologists Timothy Mousseau and Anders Pape Moller have been studying long-term effects of radioactive contamination on nature since 1999 in the closed area surrounding Chornobyl, the site of world’s worst nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986.
Their work is taking place in the exclusion zone, a 30-kilometer radius around the nuclear power plant. It provides a perfect ground for the study of biodiversity and survival of animals living in the conditions of irradiated environment. The team has documented many consequences of radiation, including dramatically increased rates of genetic mutation, lower life spans and lower reproduction rates of some species.
Luxembourg's Minister for Health, Mars Di Bartolomeo, has confirmed that no nuclear waste is, nor has been, transported through the Grand Duchy.
The information was provided in response to a parliamentary question which was raised following an incident this summer when a train carrying nuclear waste was stopped (outside Luxembourg) on its way to the Moselle.
Vilnius - A referendum held in Lithuania to decide the future of the Baltic nation's only nuclear power plant has failed to attract the necessary number of voters to be judged valid, official sources said on Monday. Lithuania agreed to close its Ignalina nuclear power plant by 2009 as part of its deal to join the European Union in 2004. A planned replacement, to be built jointly with Estonia, Latvia and Poland, is unlikely to be ready before 2015.
The former Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen (soc dem) said at an energy seminar Thursday that Finland should greenlight all three nuclear power stations planned by utilities in order to bolster the country's energy security.
He added Finland should simultaneously boost spending on energy research and development and investments.
The Belarusian government’s plans to build a nuclear power plant are fraught with “multiple troubles and ordeals for the people,” Belarusian expert Heorhiy Lepin said at an international conference in Vilnius on October 9.
He described nuclear energy programs as “the most costly and the most hazardous of all power generation technologies.” “This danger is connected not only with the possibility of accidents: a nuclear reactor pollutes the environment during its routine operation,” Dr. Lepin said.
REPAIRS at British Energy's coal-fired Eggborough power station will be delayed until next year after the company said maintenance of its ageing nuclear power reactors is taking longer than expected.
The nuclear power group, which recently agreed to a £12.5bn marriage with French giant EDF, said maintenance of a unit at Eggborough in North Yorkshire will now happen in the first quarter of next year rather than November.
"No more Chernobyl disasters," Kristen Touborg MP writes in Jyllands-Posten. A member of Denmark's Socialist People's Party, Touborg is also deputy chair of the Nordic Council Environment and Natural Resources Committee. The committee visited Chernobyl and the surrounding areas of Ukraine and Belarus during the summer and the impression made by field trip has not diminished her opposition to nuclear power.
