International

Courtesy: SaskPower There was no debate among our editorial team when it came to selecting the most interesting and worthy project worldwide for this year’s top award. Boundary Dam Power Station Unit 3 is the world’s first operating coal-fired power plant to implement a full-scale post-combustion carbon capture and storage system. It did so more […]

France’s state-owned utility EDF will snap up between 51% and 75% of troubled nuclear giant AREVA’s reactor business in a possible $2.96 billion deal.  While the French government owns about 87% of AREVA and 85% of EDF, the utility that operates the nation’s aging 58-reactor fleet, it has pledged to look at all options to […]

Though the U.S. Senate voted 64–29 this week to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im), the House may adjourn for its summer break without taking action on the issue.  Congress let the Ex-Im bank’s charter lapse for the first time in its 81 years of continuous operation on June […]

As part of a remedy package to appease the European Commission, Alstom will accept $331 million less than the original $13.63 billion purchase price offered by General Electric (GE) to close the deal.  The much-anticipated deal has come under close scrutiny by the European Commission, which opened a full-scale antitrust investigation into the deal on […]

Five of Germany’s largest lignite power plants will be mothballed to allow the country that is already phasing out nuclear power to meet ambitious climate goals by 2020.  In what it called a “milestone decision,” the government on July 2 agreed to scrap plans to impose a controversial—and by some accounts, illegal—climate tax for conventional […]

China on June 29 submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) for reducing carbon emissions to the United Nations in preparation for the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris later this year. The INDCs are formal pledges toward a hoped-for binding agreement. The Chinese pledge builds on its November agreement with the U.S. In its INDC, […]

This is a web supplement to “Riding Off into the Sunset: Nuclear Decontamination and Decommissioning Update,” appearing in the July 2015 issue of POWER.   The Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) is located in eastern Lithuania near Visaginas—a town of more than 20,000 people founded in the mid-1970s for workers constructing INPP and for the […]

Several major nuclear announcements surfaced from around the world this week. South Korea plans to retire its oldest nuclear reactor early, Nigeria selected two sites for the construction of four nuclear reactors, while Pakistan approved the construction of two China-assisted reactors.  KHNP Moves to Retire Kori 1 Early  Amid growing concerns about the safety of […]

At the annual Power-Gen Europe Conference held in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven called for greater leadership as Europe tackles de-carbonization, distributed energy, and market integration. She began her presentation by highlighting one of the biggest changes to Europe’s power markets: The May 20 decision to […]

Germany’s tax on nuclear fuel rods is not against European Union (EU) law, the bloc’s top court has ruled. The decision from the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union on June 4 may be detrimental to utilities that own nuclear power plants, which have already paid about $5.67 billion in the levies that […]