National Front leader Marine Le Pen would look for ways to pull Electricite de France SA out of its 18 billion-pound ($22.3 billion) Hinkley Point nuclear contract in the U.K. if she’s elected France’s president, one of her aides said.“We will respect the commitment of the French state, but if clauses in the contract allow an exit from this project we will study them,” Philippe Murer, Le Pen’s adviser on energy and environmental matters, said in an interview Friday. The National Front “was fundamentally against the project,” which is diverting the state-controlled utility’s resources at a time when it needs to increase spending to support the struggling nuclear industry at home, extend the lifetime of its aging domestic atomic plants and complete a new reactor at Flamanville in western France, he said.
Bloomberg 10th April 2017 read more »
Power Engineering 10th April 2017 read more »
Successive UK governments have been unusually attached to the nuclear industry, and its revival, despite worldwide trends towards investment in renewable technologies in recent years. Nuclear power is becoming increasingly expensive, while the costs of other options are falling – and with no new reactors built since the 90s, the sector had faced a retiring workforce. The government’s fixation therefore seems, like much of its energy policy, perplexing. The mysterious question of ‘why?’ was the basis of research published last year by three academics at Sussex University: Andy Stirling, Philip Johnstone and Emily Cox. Their answer? “The unusual intensity of UK commitments to civil nuclear power are especially understandable in light of a parallel but distinct policy aim that also deeply pervades elite British political cultures. This is the goal of maintaining national capabilities to build and operate nuclear-propelled submarines”.
Bristol Cable (accessed) 12th April 2017 read more »