Hej,
Jag är inte säker på att alla uppgifterna i nedanstående artikel är korrekta. De från Neil Beddall är tveksamma. - Kärnkraftverket Brunsbüttel som tillhör Vattenfall står också stilla sedan två år. Det som Gabriel säger kan missuppfattas: Han menar inte att man ska bygga nya reaktorer utan att man möjligen kan överföra tiderna av äldre reaktorer till nyare. Biblis A och B och Neckarwestheim ska stängas 2010, fyra andra år 2012.
Hälsningar
Ingeborg
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Vattenfall’s Kruemmel Reactor Won’t Start for Months (Update2)
By Lars Paulsson and Nicholas Comfort
July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Vattenfall AB, the Nordic region’s biggest utility, said its Kruemmel reactor in Germany won’t start for “several months” and that the plant’s head resigned.
Vattenfall will replace two transformers at the nuclear facility, the Stockholm-based company said today in an e-mailed statement. Hans-Dieter Lucht, head of the 1,346-megawatt plant near Hamburg, quit after two automatic halts this month.
The 25-year-old Kruemmel reactor stopped on July 4 for the second time in a week following a short circuit in one of the transformers. In June, the plant returned from a two-year outage caused by a fault in the other transformer, which led to a fire.
“It’s not disastrous for Vattenfall, but nuclear is a low- cost generation where they would expect to make a good margin,” Neil Beddall, director of utility credit research at Barclays Capital, said today in a telephone interview from London.
E.ON AG, Germany’s largest utility, owns a 50 percent stake in Kruemmel. Vattenfall’s 771-megawatt Brunsbuettel reactor, also co-owned with E.ON, has been shut for two years following a short circuit in the power grid nearby. The outages, which prompted an initial “exodus” of clients, cut first-quarter earnings by 135 million euros ($188 million), Vattenfall CEO Lars Josefsson said in April.
German power prices for August rose for a second day, adding 0.9 percent to 33.20 euros a megawatt hour, according to broker ICAP Plc on Bloomberg.
Planned Shutdowns
Germany’s nuclear law states that the country’s 17 working reactors should be shut down around 2021 depending on how much power they produce. Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel yesterday said the country should speed up the closure of aging nuclear reactors after Kruemmel shut down. The remaining operating life of older reactors could be transferred to newer plants in an amendment to legislation, Gabriel said.
Initial investigations at Kruemmel have shown that the incident occurred because an appliance used to measure partial discharges at the transformer hadn’t been installed before the plant restarted, Vattenfall said.
“With the decision to switch the machine transformers, we are consequently taking the path of the highest safety,” Tuomo Hatakka, head of Vattenfall’s Central Europe division, said in today’s statement.
Walther Stubbe will replace Lucht as head of Kruemmel, the company said, without providing details of his background.
Since Kruemmel’s 2007 halt, Vattenfall has carried out work to avoid short circuits and eliminate any “serious impact” should such an event occur, the company said in a separate statement on July 5.
To contact the reporter on this story: Lars Paulsson in London at lpaulsson@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 7, 2009 09:18 EDT
