nuclear-news

Despite public opposition, Spain’s aging nuclear plant may stay open

Spain ageing nuclear plant may stay open: report,  By Martin Roberts; MADRID | Mon Jan 2,  (Reuters) – Spain’s incoming centre-right government may allow an ageing nuclear plant to stay open beyond a 2013 deadline for closing set by its Socialist predecessors, a newspaper report said on Monday.
Environmentalist groups have protested that Spain is out of step with countries like Germany, which closed seven older nuclear plants after Japan’s Fukushima disaster last year and plans to shut the rest within a decade.

In 2009, then-premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero ordered the Garona plant to close in 2013, by which point it will have been in operation two years more than a benchmark 40-year lifespan…. Running nuclear plants is profitable, however, and in their unsuccessful election
campaign the Socialists proposed introducing a windfall tax on them.

Spanish voters are generally opposed to nuclear power – which provides about 21 percent of the country’s electricity – and no new plants are planned…….

January 3, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Spain