ONE of the front runners in the race to build a new nuclear power station at Wylfa looks poised to complete an £12bn deal for British Energy which could cool its interest on Anglesey.
UK nuclear firm British Energy is expected to be snapped up by French power giants EDF (Electricité de France), which recently revealed it was buying up farmland around Wylfa, owned by the National Decommissioning Authority.
With the Copenhagen climate conference under way, the UK government under pressure to cut carbon emissions and Wylfa on Anglesey shortlisted for a new nuclear power station, BBC Wales' environment correspondent Iolo ap Dafydd asks if nuclear is the low carbon answer to energy security in the future.
Inside the ageing Wylfa plant there are four large turbines which are part of the process to produce electricity 24 hours a day.
When fully operational, they produce enough electricity to power both Liverpool and Manchester simultaneously.
With a predicted shortage of energy by 2015, should we build more nuclear power stations?
With the Copenhagen climate conference under way, the UK government under pressure to cut carbon emissions and Wylfa on Anglesey shortlisted for a new nuclear power station, BBC Wales' environment correspondent Iolo ap Dafydd asks if nuclear is the low carbon answer to energy security in the future.
Inside the ageing Wylfa plant there are four large turbines which are part of the process to produce electricity 24 hours a day.
When fully operational, they produce enough electricity to power both Liverpool and Manchester simultaneously.
With a predicted shortage of energy by 2015, should we build more nuclear power stations?
Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas) -- The ageing Wylfa nuclear power plant in Wales has moved closer to being decommissioned following consent from the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. The agency's permission is the first of two needed for the Wylfa plant to finally start decommissioning work.
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A multinational consortium of energy companies is paying £70m for land adjacent to Sellafield suitable for building a new atomic power station.
Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), Spain's Iberdrola and France's GDF Suez have acquired the 470-acre site, which is the fourth piece of land to be sold by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The consortium plans to build an installation with a capacity of up to 3.6 gigawatts, starting in 2015.
The SSE/Iberdrola/GDF group is the third new entrant to the UK nuclear industry after France's EDF bought British Energy for £12.5bn in January, and a consortium of Germany's RWE Npower and E.ON was successful in earlier NDA land auctions in April.
SSE/Iberdrola/GDF was also a bidder in previous auctions for land at Wylfa, Oldbury and Bradwell. But the group pulled out after competition became so fierce it ran for six weeks rather than the expected one, and netted the Government a whopping £387m rather than the expected £100m.
A multinational consortium of energy companies is paying £70m for land adjacent to Sellafield suitable for building a new atomic power station.
Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), Spain's Iberdrola and France's GDF Suez have acquired the 470-acre site, which is the fourth piece of land to be sold by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The consortium plans to build an installation with a capacity of up to 3.6 gigawatts, starting in 2015.
The SSE/Iberdrola/GDF group is the third new entrant to the UK nuclear industry after France's EDF bought British Energy for £12.5bn in January, and a consortium of Germany's RWE Npower and E.ON was successful in earlier NDA land auctions in April.
SSE/Iberdrola/GDF was also a bidder in previous auctions for land at Wylfa, Oldbury and Bradwell. But the group pulled out after competition became so fierce it ran for six weeks rather than the expected one, and netted the Government a whopping £387m rather than the expected £100m.
Four potential sites for new nuclear power stations have been proposed as the government's process for choosing suitable locations starts in earnest.
Sellafield in Cumbria, Bradwell in Essex, Oldbury in Gloucestershire and Wylfa in Anglesey have been named by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
The criteria on which sites will be judged will be published on Tuesday, with a decision due later this year.
MOST North Wales councils have decided to snub an appeal by the British Government to bury nuclear waste in their areas - despite financial incentives.
North Wales has two Magnox nuclear power station sites, Trawsfynydd in Gwynedd, which closed in 1991 and where clean-up operations are ongoing, and the still-operational Wylfa power plant on Anglesey.
RADIOACTIVE waste from a new generation of nuclear power stations will have to be stored above ground for 100 years, the Government has been told.
The claim comes as the possibility of a nuclear power station being built to replace the existing one at Wylfa on Anglesey continues to grow.
Hugh Richards, of the Welsh Anti Nuclear Alliance (Wana), told officials at the Department for Environment and Climate Change: "Both the promoters of new reactors and the Government have largely ignored the implications of those reactors discharging high burn-up spent fuel. New-build spent fuel, already acknowledged as twice as hot and twice as radioactive as legacy-spent fuel, will have to cool down for 100 years on each site before it can go for deep underground disposal.
"About 30 campaigners have held a protest over plans to build a new nuclear power plant on Anglesey.
It follows the announcement on Tuesday by the Horizon Nuclear Power company that it wants to see a new station on the island by 2020.
It would replace the current nuclear reactors at Wylfa which are due to halt electricity generation in December.
But the protesters, gathered at Menai Bridge, dispute claims over the economic benefits and the safety.
Horizon Nuclear Power has said it will apply for planning consent in 2012 to build a reactor on the island to produce up to 3,300Mw of electricity. "
"The Government's £73bn nuclear decommissioning programme is to be accelerated with a radical repackaging of its private sector contracts.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) had planned up to five nuclear plant clean-up contracts, which would be let sequentially and take about two years each to select a preferred bidder. This has now been cut by two, with the later three projects combined into a single £13bn-plus outsourcing contract. The large value of this contract will also ensure greater private sector interest.
Originally, the clean-up of its Magnox reactors, relics from the 1960s, were to be split into north and south site contracts. The south included Sizewell A, Suffolk, and Hinkley Point A, Somerset, while the north had Wylfa in Anglesey, North Wales, and Chapelcross, south-west Scotland. "