Prague - The Dukovany nuclear power plant, owned by Czech power giant CEZ, nearly shut down one of its four units Tuesday owing to an employee's mistake, the company said.
Unit's two turbines were automatically switched off from the grid after a technician mistakenly turned off one of its six cooling circuits.
The French nuclear power company Areva could end up paying billions of euros to compensate for delays in the Olkiluoto nuclear power project.
A report in the online financial publication Capital said that Areva could pay the power generation company Teollisuuden Voima up to 2.2 billion euros. The publication based its report on information from confidential sources. Areva refutes the claims.
The No. 1 nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto on Finland's west coast remains offline due to an electrical problem. The fault was detected on Friday when technicians were re-starting the plant after annual maintenance work.
The TVO utility is trying to find out what caused the problem, and says that it is impossible to say when the reactor can be re-started.
Energysolutions and its partner Toshiba propose taking ownership of Magnox sites and building new reactors on them
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon paid a visit to Finland on Friday. He was the guest of Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen.
Discussions between the two focused on France's upcoming term as EU president, which begins a month from now. France intends to emphasize environmental issues.
The Italian government, whose public debt of €1.624 trillion is already the world's third largest, seems eager to dig deeper. Last week, recently re-elected Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made good on his campaign pledge to recommit Italy to nuclear power. This seemed just the thing to address the country's rising oil and gas prices and growing French electricity imports -- except for one thing: Mr. Berlusconi's promised nuclear power plants are unlikely to ever be built.
MILAN (Reuters) - Italy should keep its ban on nuclear power and should boost solar and wind energy instead to resolve its energy supply problems, Italian environmentalists said on Thursday as nuclear revival debate heated up.
Italy banned nuclear power in a 1987 referendum after the Chernobyl disaster. But calls for a nuclear renaissance have intensified this month under the new government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as oil prices stormed record highs.
ROME, May 29 (AFP) May 29, 2008 Albania is prepared to host a nuclear power plant for Italy, which decided last week to reverse a 20-year ban on the energy source, the Italian press
reported on Thursday.
"With the Italian government, we will finance the construction of a plant in Albania," Albanian President Sali Berisha told the leading daily Corriere della Sera.
The latest review of Sweden's energy policy by the International energy agency (IEA) congratulates the government for "continued outstanding progress during the last four years" but regrets that "the outlook for nuclear energy remains a major energy policy question, almost three decades after the 1980 popular vote to phase it out".
BRATISLAVA (AFP) - Environmental group Greenpeace will lodge a legal challenge to Slovak authorities' go ahead for the completion of two nuclear power stations in the country's west, a representative said Wednesday.
The organisation will complain to the supreme court against the go ahead for completion of Mochovce's third and fourth nuclear reactors without prior environmental impact assessments being carried out.
