Engineering news
The disaster at Fukushima looked to have stalled Westinghouse’s plans to build reactors in the UK
Japan's Toshiba has bought Spanish utility Iberdrola's stake in the NuGen consortium that is aiming to develop new nuclear reactors at Sellafield, according to reports.
The deal could give nuclear reactor builder Westinghouse, which is owned by Toshiba, a fresh foothold to develop its AP1000 design in the UK. The company, which had completed all but the final stage of the Generic Design Assessment for reactor new build, was hoping to construct the AP1000 on sites owned by Horizon Nuclear Power. But the backlash against nuclear power in Germany in the wake of the Fukushima disaster led utilities RWE npower and E.on to pull out of the project. The companies, which operate the majority of Germany's power stations, are aiming to shut down all their nuclear reactors by 2022. Japan's Hitachi now controls Horizon and expects to build its own nuclear reactor design on the two sites.
Iberdrola reportedly said this week that it had sold its NuGen stake to Toshiba for £85 million. The deal will require regulatory approval. The other partner in the NuGen scheme is French utility GDF Suez. NuGen owns a site at Sellafield where it plans to build 3.6 GW of new nuclear capacity. A 25% stake in the project was formerly owned by Scottish and Southern Energy but was sold to Iberdrola and GDF Suez for about £6 million in 2012. The entire option for the site had been worth almost £20 million when it was acquired in 2009. Sellafield was named as a suitable place to build a new nuclear power station in the National Policy Statement on nuclear power generation published in June 2011.
NuGen has signed contracts with engineering consultancy Amec for environmental support on its forthcoming site works, and to carry out ecological and ornithological studies. It has completed first-stage ecological surveys at the Moorside site at Sellafield, the company said, and is continuing with flora and fauna surveys. The company is also preparing specifications for an Environmental Impact Assessment, which it said would constitute a milestone on the journey for permission to build a nuclear power station at Moorside.
An expected renaissance in nuclear power in the UK has yet to materialise. In October, the government approved a deal with French utility EDF Energy to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset, following months of wrangling over the level of subsidy, or “strike price”, that the public would pay for electricity generated by the new reactor. The European Commission recently announced that it did not believe a subsidy was definitely necessary and that it would investigate whether the deal breached EU rules on state aid.
A spokeswoman for Toshiba, Westinghouse's parent company, declined to comment on the acquisition of the NuGen stake.