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According to the newspaper Expressen, the Swedish power company Vattenfall has signed a binding commitment stating that they have unlimited financial responsibility for the costs in case there would be an accident in one of their nuclear power plants in Germany, something the company denied last week. The storm around Vattenfall continues. Expressen writes that Vattenfall has claimed that the contract can be singlehandedly broken by Vattenfall at any time. Expressen has however read a copy of the contract and after consulting juridical expertise they claim it can not be broken during a five year period from the signing in June this year. This means that the whole company could go bankrupt in case of such an accident.

According to the newspaper Expressen, the Swedish power company Vattenfall has signed a binding commitment stating that they have unlimited financial responsibility for the costs in case there would be an accident in one of their nuclear power plants in Germany, something the company denied last week. The storm around Vattenfall continues. Expressen writes that Vattenfall has claimed that the contract can be singlehandedly broken by Vattenfall at any time. Expressen has however read a copy of the contract and after consulting juridical expertise they claim it can not be broken during a five year period from the signing in June this year. This means that the whole company could go bankrupt in case of such an accident.

Berlin - Swedish electricity giant Vattenfall admitted Thursday to additional problems at one of its German nuclear power stations, which caught fire several days ago just after a two-year refit from a previous fire. Blunders at the Kruemmel power station have turned nuclear safety into an election issue in Germany. Though neither of the fires was in the reactor itself, Vattenfall said it had also discovered at least one of the 80,000 rods of uranium inside the reactor was "defective." The defect was not connected to the shutdown of the reactor during an electrical transformer fire on Saturday. Engineers are to take the lid off the idled reactor on Friday to search for the rods, Vattenfall said. Tuoma Hatakka, chief executive of Vattenfall Europe, the German subsidiary which runs several of the 12 nuclear power stations in Germany, insisted in Berlin, "My summary is simple: Kruemmel is safe."

Germany's environment ministry denied approval for nuclear operator Vattenfall Europe [VATN.UL] to keep its Brunsbuettel reactor open longer, a fresh blow to operators' attemps of getting around a national closure plan. Vattenfall in May 2007 had asked to transfer 15 terawatt hours of power production quotas from its nuclear plant at Kruemmel in north Germany to Brunsbuettel, in order to lengthen Brunsbuettel's life cycle by another two-and-a-half years.

Swedish-based electricity group Vattenfall sacked the head of one of Germany's nuclear power stations on Tuesday, three days after a short circuit crippled the reactor he was in charge of. Although the fault did not involve the reactor itself, it has brought the controversial issue of nuclear power back into play just three months before the country's general election. The incident occured at the Kruemmel reactor east of Hamburg, one of Germany's 17 reactors. Vattenfall blamed the plant manager, whom it did not name, for failing to install discharge detectors on a transformer as promised to the German authorities. It added that the two electrical transformers supplying power to on-site machinery would not be repaired, but completely replaced after one of the units failed Saturday.

* Swedish govt demands explanation of nuclear problems * Swedish authority says Ringhals plant must boost safety * Says plant has not solved lingering safety concerns (Releads with Swedish government, adds Ringhals comment) By Niklas Pollard STOCKHOLM, July 8 (Reuters) - Sweden demanded on Wednesday that state-owned power utility Vattenfall provide an account of its work on nuclear safety after problems at one of its plants in Germany and security concerns at another in Sweden. The government's request was made after Swedish authorities earlier on Wednesday ordered the utility's majority-owned Ringhals nuclear plant, located south of the city of Gothenburg in south-west Sweden, to take steps to improve safety. The decision by the Nordic country's nuclear watchdog came in the wake of a failed restart of Vattenfall's nuclear plant at Kruemmel, northern Germany, which caused power outages across the city of Hamburg on Saturday.

Germany's Federal Administrative Court has ruled that utilities RWE (RWEG.DE) and Vattenfall [VATN.UL] may not extend the lifespan of their Biblis A and Brunsbuettel nuclear power plants as they had sought. The utilities had planned to transfer allowances to produce power at the Muelheim-Kaerlich nuclear power plant to Biblis A and Brunsbuettel and thus operate the power plants longer than initially planned.

Swedish power group Vattenfall [VATN.UL] said on Tuesday an inspection had revealed one broken control rod and cracks in about 30 percent of others at its Forsmark 3 reactor. Forsmark communications director Claes-Inge Andersson told Reuters that about 100 out of 169 rods had been inspected and cracks had been found in some 25-30 percent of them.

The weekend shutdown of Germany's Krümmel nuclear plant has prompted political calls to close the country's oldest nukes over safety concerns The Krümmel nuclear power station near Hamburg was shut down on Saturday after a fault in a transformer, blacking out most traffic lights in the German port city and interrupting the water supply to thousands of homes. Power company Vattenfall said there was no release of radioactivity and no danger to the public as a result of the incident, which occurred just two weeks after the plant was restarted following a two-year shutdown caused by a fire in a transformer.

To judge from the bounce in German energy companies' share prices, you might think Sunday's centre-right election victory means it's springtime for nuclear power in Germany. The reality is more likely to be a longer atomic autumn before ageing reactors are laid to rest. Both the conservatives and the liberal Free Democrats want to prolong the lifetime of Germany's 17 existing nuclear plants, but not build new ones. That will still be lucrative for utilities such as RWE (RWEG.DE), E.ON (EONGn.DE>, Vattenfall [VATN.UL] and EnBW (EBKG.DE), which face an uncertain future as Europe switches to a greener energy mix and EU regulators force them to divest their grids and pipelines.

To judge from the bounce in German energy companies' share prices, you might think Sunday's centre-right election victory means it's springtime for nuclear power in Germany. The reality is more likely to be a longer atomic autumn before ageing reactors are laid to rest. Both the conservatives and the liberal Free Democrats want to prolong the lifetime of Germany's 17 existing nuclear plants, but not build new ones. That will still be lucrative for utilities such as RWE (RWEG.DE), E.ON (EONGn.DE>, Vattenfall [VATN.UL] and EnBW (EBKG.DE), which face an uncertain future as Europe switches to a greener energy mix and EU regulators force them to divest their grids and pipelines.

"Germany's government has proposed a new nuclear fuel tax as part of a wider austerity package, without linking this explicitly to the expected extension of nuclear run-times. According to a statement posted on the government's website, extra profits generated by nuclear plant operators in the wake of higher power prices because of extra CO2 certificates justifies the next tax, which also will contribute to financing nuclear waste storage solutions. From 2011, the government expects Eur2.3 billion ($2.8 billion) a year until 2014 from nuclear plant operators through the planned new measures. E.ON, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall Europe, which run Germany's 17 operational reactors, are hoping their plants' life spans will be extended beyond the start of the next decade, when nuclear power should be phased out, according to a still valid law. "