Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
As far as I can see the problem is a hell of lot more complex than what you depict. The Finland plant will not be operative until at least 2010. That's 13 years to build a plant. Nuclear plants appear to be high financial risks because of the variations in costs of energy. According to Steve Thomas of the University of Greenwich a plant has to run 60 years at 85% capacity to repay itself at a stable cost of kilowatt-hours. France's EdF can write off losses to consumers while in Finland the shareholders are the major consumers. Sort of captive markets. In Britain the government had to bail out British Energy in 2002 to avoid bankruptcy.

As for the EdF-Enel accord, it dates back to 2005 and seems nothing more than a classic business operation, certainly not "begging." There is a hell of a lot of under-the-table kicking in the story that involves protectionist actions first by the Italians against EdF on the Italian market and recently by the French in the Gaz de France-Suez merger. That Edf reneged on Flamanville is news to me, nor have I found anything in the press on it.

Enel did buy 66% of Slovenske Elektrarne which has nuclear plants in April 2006.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Sat Feb 24th, 2007 at 05:11:57 PM EST

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Occasional Series