Spanish:
 
|
Britain set to approve nuclear clean-up strategy
AFP
LONDON
Petroleumworld.com 03 30 06Britain's government was expected on Thursday to approve a strategy for the withdrawal from service and clean-up of the nation's civil nuclear facilities.
Trade and Industry secretary Alan Johnson was set to approve a strategy drawn up by Britain's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a spokesman for the NDA said.
"We are expecting approval of the strategy tomorrow," he told AFP Wednesday.
A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry said Johnson would give Thursday judgement on the strategy and also on whether to approve the sale of the state-owned British Nuclear Group.
The Guardian newspaper said Wednesday that the government would back the sale of BNG, the clean-up arm of British Nuclear Fuels, alongside plans to hand over the decommissioning of atomic sites across Britain to private companies.
The sale of BNG would reap 1.0 billion pounds (1.44 billion euros, 1.73 billion dollars), the daily added.
Meanwhile the Financial Times said Wednesday that the cost of decommissioning Britain's ageing nuclear power plants would be 9.0 billion pounds higher than ministers' estimates.
The NDA was expected to say that it has uncovered far more hazardous radioactive waste than anticipated beneath the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, northwestern England, the FT reported.
The NDA has therefore revised higher its estimate for the total clean-up costs across British sites to 65 billion pounds from 56 billion, it added.
"I can't confirm that the figure is either accurate or inaccurate," the NDA spokesman said.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is a non-departmental public body, set up in April 2005.
Its strategy was being published after British Prime Minister Tony Blair's goverment announced last November a sweeping review of the country's energy needs that will specifically look into the option of building new nuclear power stations.
The government was expected to publish a policy statement later this year.
Blair -- who is reportedly in favour of resurrecting Britain's nuclear energy programme -- has suggested that a combination of nuclear and renewable sources such as wind power could be the way forward.
Blair believes that Britain, like many countries, needs to diversify out of dependence on one source of energy as the country's existing coal and nuclear plants neared decommissioning.
A switch to nuclear would be a major policy shift for Blair and likely to provoke strong reaction from environmentalists but also within his governing Labour Party.
Britain has about a dozen nuclear power stations, most of them built in the 1960s and 1970s, providing about 25 percent of the country's electricity, compared with natural gas which provides about 40 percent.
Proponents of new reactors -- which emit virtually no carbon dioxide -- argue they would help Britain meet its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2010.
Opponents highlight a number of issues, particularly the unresolved problem of nuclear waste.
AFP 29 03 06 1606 GMTCopyright © 1994-2006 Agence France-Presse. All Rights Reserved.
Your
feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.
Write to editor@petroleumworld.com
Any
question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com
Best
Viewed with IE
5.01+
Windows
NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels