PARIS (AFP) — Two senior executives at French state energy giant Electricite de France (EDF) have been charged on suspicion of spying on Greenpeace, a judicial official said Tuesday.
EDF security chiefs Pierre Francois and Pierre Durieux are charged with conspiring to hack into computer systems including at the environmental group, the official said, confirming a report on the Mediapart website.
BRUSSELS — BRUSSELS: As France presses ahead with building more next-generation nuclear reactors, new evidence emerged Friday to suggest that industry and governments may be unprepared to handle the increasingly toxic waste that will result.
Highlighting the importance of the technology in France, both as its main source of electricity and as a major export industry, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced late Thursday that Électricité de France, Europe's biggest power producer, was awarded the contract to develop a second atomic reactor using next-generation technology.
Individual payments of up to £1m have been handed out from the public purse as a "golden goodbye" to directors at the loss-making nuclear holding group BNFL, according to the latest set of accounts.
David Bonser, executive director for human resources and a key figure in the development of BNFL's troubled Thorp reprocessing plant, received £1,046,350 compensation for ending his employment last month. That was on top of an annual salary and bonuses worth £577,112 for the 12 months to March 31, 2008.
Balkan states are gambling on the nuclear option as the best way to reduce the energy shortage but whether the risks pay off remains to be seen.
The three guards stand at the gate in the 40°C afternoon heat, ignoring the bustle around them. Grim-looking barbed wire coils round the top of the tall fence, as if designed to stop convicts escaping from prison.
MOSCOW, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- An uncompleted project to clean up a radioactive former dump in a densely populated Moscow suburb is endangering the health of residents, advocates say.
A mound along Marshala Rokossovskogo Boulevard that for years was used by children as a sledding hill actually contained radioactive waste dumped there in the 1940s and 1950s, and after beginning an excavation to enable the building of new apartments on the site, officials have suspended the operation, the Moscow Times reported Tuesday.
RAUMA, Finland — The cafe where Paivi Alanko-Rehelma serves coffee and smoked fish stands practically in the shadow of a sprawling building site on the island of Olkiluoto where Finland is erecting a nuclear power plant, the island’s third, and Finland’s fifth in the last 30 years.
Rauma is about 10 miles from Olkiluoto, a nuclear plant site.
Projected cost of Mochovce's completion has ballooned
10 Nov 2008 Beata Balogová Business - JUST weeks after the government approved its strategy on energy security, which is intended to guide policy for the next 20 years or so and which defined nuclear energy as one of its key pillars, Slovakia’s dominant power generator started the construction phase of two further blocks at the Mochovce nuclear plant.
Sofia. German company RWE will from now on decide whether to grant the investment promised.
The signing of the shareholding contract for Belene nuclear power plant through which German company RWE will gain 49% of the future plant's stakes, was postponed. Instead of end-October 2008 when the last deadline expired, the paper will most likely be endorsed in December 2008, the project's main investor National Electricity Company (NEC) said, The Banker Weekly reported.
Bulgaria's planned nuclear power plant at Belene on the Danube River is amongst the most dangerous contemplated projects of its kind in the whole world, Greenpeace nuclear analyst Heinz Smital has said, as quoted by Deutsche Welle.
According to Smital's warning, Belene was massive and irresponsible gamble, which would only tarnish the reparation of RWE, the German company picked as the strategic investor in the nuclear power plant. Far worse, the German company was playing Russian roulette with people's lives in the entire region of South-Eastern Europe, he said.
Public consultations carried out by the government on new nuclear energy plants were flawed, the UK's market research trade body ruled yesterday.
The Market Research Standards Board said the consultation, carried out by Opinion Leader Research, was in breach of its code of conduct. In the sessions in which the public were asked for their opinions on nuclear power, "information was inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced, which gave rise to a material risk of respondents being led towards a particular answer".
