British Energy Share Discussion Threads

[hightech] 03/7/2005 08:59

Is BGY profitable if they sell Electricily at the current market price?

[cat] 01/7/2005 09:46

£5 next stop

[huwrayhenry] 28/6/2005 21:12

ummm who has vast experience with nuclear power generation....BGY

[nobrainer31] 28/6/2005 11:17

cheers and a quick explanation as to why it's such good news for bgy would be appreciated.

[pc4900074200] 28/6/2005 08:21

The Scotsman. 28-06-2005.

Blair poised to say Yes to more nuclear power.



The Scottish Executive has raised concerns about the disposal of atomic stations' radioactive waste, the sort of work carried out at British Nuclear Fuels' Sellafield plant in Cumbria. Picture: PA

JAMES KIRKUP. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

Key points
• Blair indicates increased usage of nuclear power is likely
• UK in danger of missing Kyoto targets for emission reductions
• Scottish Executive has said it will block any stations planned for Scotland

Key quote
"If you look at how much we are going to need to boost renewable energy by over the next ten to 15 years, it's a lot. I'm not saying we can't do it, but I am saying it's a huge investment and it's going to be very tough to do, and there are other countries that are going to make a different choice on nuclear power." - TONY BLAIR

Story in full TONY Blair yesterday gave his clearest signal yet that he will authorise the controversial building of a new generation of nuclear reactors.

To the dismay of environmental campaigners, the Prime Minister answered a question about new nuclear stations by casting doubt on whether wind and wave farms or solar power were viable alternatives.

Mr Blair also tacitly criticised the Scottish Executive's plan to block any new nuclear power station in Scotland, saying it was not "responsible" to rule out a new wave of generators come what may.

The current generation of nuclear stations is due to be wound down over the coming years. Hunterston B, in Ayrshire, is scheduled to close in 2011; Torness, in East Lothian, is due to run until 2023.

Such closures mean Mr Blair, who has committed himself to cutting British emissions, will have to decide over the next year how to replace their energy output.

Nuclear plants generate about 23 per cent of the United Kingdom's electricity, and 40 per cent in Scotland. Renewables account for less than 3 per cent of all UK electricity, and about 11 per cent in Scotland.

The Prime Minister pointedly noted at his monthly Downing Street news conference yesterday that other countries were embracing nuclear power for their future energy needs.

"If you look at how much we are going to need to boost renewable energy by over the next ten to 15 years, it's a lot," Mr Blair said of the prospect that such sources could remove the need to build new reactors. "I'm not saying we can't do it, but I am saying it's a huge investment and it's going to be very tough to do, and there are other countries that are going to make a different choice on nuclear power."

That appeared to be a reference to the United States, which is moving towards much greater use of atomic energy.

President George Bush has been pushing the US Congress to authorise the building of the country's first new nuclear power plants for 30 years. And a leaked draft of a G8 paper obtained by The Scotsman earlier this month showed that British negotiators were willing to allow the final Gleneagles declaration next week to include references to "Generation IV", a US energy department plan to encourage new nuclear plants worldwide.

While Scotland's energy policy is reserved to Westminster, planning controls are devolved and, under pressure from the Liberal Democrats, Jack McConnell, the First Minister, has agreed the Executive will block the building of any new nuclear power stations because of concerns about the disposal of radioactive waste.

Asked about those reservations yesterday, Mr Blair insisted that he did not agree with those who wanted to rule out new atomic power stations at this stage.

"Anybody who is responsibly looking at this can't simply say, 'we are refusing ever to look at the issue of nuclear power again'," he said.

However, he accepted that new stations could be built only if there was public acceptance and the project was affordable. Some experts have suggested that private industry would be reluctant to pay for new nuclear stations without massive government aid.

While ministers including Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, are known to be highly sceptical about the case for new nuclear reactors, Mr Blair is much more sympathetic. In particular, Professor David King, the Prime Minister's chief scientific adviser, has been arguing that nuclear power is the only way Britain can hope to meet its Kyoto targets on emissions.

Figures published in April showed that Britain's carbon dioxide emissions rose by 1.5 per cent in 2004 - the second year running that emissions have increased.

That rise has put Britain in danger of missing its Kyoto targets, an outcome that would severely embarrass Mr Blair and badly wound his ability to argue for reductions in US emissions.

While Mr Blair repeated at his news conference that the government had made no decisions on future energy plans, the SNP accused him of a "soft-shoe shuffle towards new nuclear power stations."

Mike Weir, the party's energy spokesman, said the government should invest more in research into renewable energy. "There is enormous potential for generating our electricity from wind, wave, tidal, biomass and other renewable resources," he said.

That call was echoed by Duncan McLaren, of Friends of the Earth Scotland.

"Nuclear power is expensive, unsafe and deeply unpopular," he said. "Nuclear waste remains dangerous for thousands of years, and is likely to cost taxpayers billions of pounds to manage.

"We still don't know what to do with the waste we have already created; it would be crazy to produce more. The future lies with clean, green renewable energy, not trying to breathe new life into discredited nuclear power."

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman, said: "Nuclear power is hopelessly uneconomic, and a new generation of power stations would only be possible with a massive subsidy from the taxpayer."

Despite making climate change one of his top priorities for the G8 summit at Gleneagles next week, Mr Blair sounded distinctly downbeat yesterday.

"I think there is no point in raising, or indeed dampening, expectations before we get to the end part of the hard negotiating," he said, drawing a contrast with rising hopes of a deal on African poverty.

"I think that on Africa there is a real sense of coming together ... climate change is obviously very difficult."

pc

[deeppockets] 27/6/2005 14:07

breakout over 400!

[grippa] 23/6/2005 14:59

Looks like 410 is getting closer...psychological 400 mark almost broken!!

[deeppockets] 23/6/2005 13:01

next level should be about 410

[deeppockets] 22/6/2005 15:38

My broker saw that as a key chart level.

[grippa] 22/6/2005 15:21

Good news from the Independent this morning, and since then price has taken off. Deeppockets...whats the relevence of 3.92?

"British Energy held steady at 380p despite news that the US fund management firm Duquesne Capital now controls 6.2 per cent of the electricity generator. The firm is run by the star Wall Street operator Stanley Druckenmiller, who is reported to be one of the key people behind George Soros' Quantum Fund.

Since January's debt-for-equity swap, the investment community has become increasingly upbeat about British Energy's prospects. One reason for this is the sharp rise in wholesale electricity prices, which have increased by one third so far this year."

[shirishg] 22/6/2005 12:54

Post removed by ADVFN

[deeppockets] 22/6/2005 12:53

If we can break 392 properly this should fly fast!

[bgyered] 19/6/2005 12:06

Even Monty can't hide the cash mountain that's building up in BGY. Carbon trading windfall + £27 per MW profit + sustained price hikes in energy market = good year for this bankrupt outfit and bumper cash crops to follow. Of course - none of this could possibly have been foreseen when BGY needed that £300M line of credit a couple of years back - oh dear me no - the shareholders just had to be slaughtered first.

[splodley] 17/6/2005 11:11

Isn't this usually where Monty issues a press release saying there is no justification for the price rise and the shares fall back. Oh happy days!

[chickano] 17/6/2005 08:20

anyone know why the gap up today?

[labcake] 09/6/2005 15:54

You are right, no press comment. Any theories about what is fuelling this price rise?

[bgyered] 08/6/2005 22:19

Up 42% in 4 months - not bad for a ex-bankrupt basket case. No press comment as usual.

If BGY can hold this 125% annual growth rate for the next 2 years I'm evens and out... I have my doubts though.

[wildchild] 10/5/2005 23:39

Yet another new closing high, and on a bad day too. Theres not many shares you can say that about today.

[extonian] 09/5/2005 00:07

Yet more gloom from The Guardian today 09/05/05

Huge radioactive leak closes Thorp nuclear plant

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Monday May 9, 2005
The Guardian

A leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of Sellafield's Thorp reprocessing plant.
The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.

Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1bn plant.


Article continues

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The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup of redundant nuclear facilities.
The closure could hardly have come at a worse time for the nuclear industry. Britain is struggling to meet its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20% of 1990 levels by 2010, despite a substantial programme of wind farm construction, while generating capacity will also be hit by the rundown of some of Britain's coal-fired power stations.

The decision on whether to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is among the most sensitive Tony Blair faces at the start of his third term.

A leak of a briefing paper to ministers on the nuclear option yesterday revealed that the contribution new nuclear capacity could make to cutting greenhouse gases had not yet been considered because of opposition from Margaret Beckett, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a quango which took over ownership of the plant from British Nuclear Fuels on April 1, has a £2.2bn cleanup budget for this year, its first year of operation, of which £560m was to come from the Thorp plant.

Richard Flynn, spokesman for the NDA, said: "If the income from the plant is not forthcoming then obviously it will put back plans for cleaning up."

On Friday the British Nuclear Group, a management company formed to run the Sellafield site on behalf of the NDA, held a meeting with the government safety regulator, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), to discuss how to mop up the leak and repair the pipe. The company has to get the inspectors' approval before proceeding.

A problem at the plant was first noticed on April 19 when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid. It was supposed to be travelling through the plant to be measured and separated into uranium, plutonium and waste products in a series of centrifuges. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak.

Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200kg (440lb) of plutonium, enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands. The liquid will have to be siphoned off and stored until the works can be repaired, but a method of doing this has yet to be devised.

The company has set up a board of inquiry to find out how the leak occurred. The NII will set up a separate investigation and has the power to prosecute if correct procedures have not been followed.

The Thorp plant produces uranium and plutonium from spent fuel in such large quantities that only a tiny proportion of it can ever be reused for reactor fuel. Its critics also claim it is uneconomic because it has never operated to design capacity since it opened 12 years ago, and is years behind schedule in fulfilling orders.

This has angered some customers and the British Nuclear Group is embroiled in a court case with one of its customers, the German owners of the Brokdorf power station, which is withholding fees of £2,772 a day for storage of spent fuel, claiming it should have been reprocessed years ago.

In 12 years Thorp has reprocessed 5,644 tonnes of fuel from its first 10-year target of 7,000 tonnes. Last year it failed to reach its target of 725 tonnes, achieving 590.

Martin Forwood, of Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment, said the NDA had been "naive" in placing trust on income from Thorp, given its track record. "Reprocessing is blatantly incompatible with the official cleanup remit of the NDA, which will now find itself out of pocket as a result of the latest Thorp accident. The new owners would do the taxpayer the greatest service by putting Thorp out of its misery and closing it once and for all."

The managing director of British Nuclear Group, Sellafield, Barry Snelson, who ordered the plant to be closed down, said: "Let me reassure people that the plant is in a safe and stable state."


Special report
The nuclear industry

Graphics
The Mox ships' journey around the world (pdf)
Nuclear map of Britain
US nuclear map

Useful links
British Energy
Department of Trade and Industry
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Greenpeace
HSE nuclear glossary
UK atomic energy authority
National Radiological Protection Board
Friends of the Earth
World Nuclear Association
World Nuclear Transport Institute

[energyi] 06/5/2005 15:21

Try the U thread:


for more Uranium miners

[southmifti] 06/5/2005 15:04

Share price has recovered to Can $53 having previously fallen below $50 as it responded to falls in other commodity stocks over the last few weeks.

The potential of discussions in the UK and other countries about an expansion in nuclear power programmes should provide underlying support for this stock.

[iulia] 06/5/2005 10:23

the good thing about newspaper articles is that the issue of nuclear energy is at last in the public domain. the bad thing is that the articles are written mostly by clueless (or even prejudiced) journalists

[bgyered] 26/4/2005 11:52

You have to wonder just how long ago our glorious leaders decided that nuclear is the only option to head off the 2010 energy crisis (God forbid it's only just percolated into their consciousness that winning a third term means they have actually survived long enough to suffer the consequences of their chaotic and incompetent energy policy). Given that one of the few practical places to build new stations is on British Energy sites (then a private company) and the only way to finance the build would be to segregate nuclear from the open market by guaranteeing fixed base load prices for the next 35 years (or rigging the market if you prefer) - that looks like a pretty uncomfortable golden egg for a Labour government to be laying for a private company.

Somehow, you'd want to arrange things so that your government could take over the running of that company, acquire a substantial shareholding, secure for yourself a major part of its future cash flows, and prevent the company from pursuing its own independent ecomonic future, without the cost of actually renationalising it - all for the modest fee of £60M a year contributed to a decommissioning agency. Now how the hell would a government do that?
____________________________________________________________________


Evening Standard, London, Anthony Hilton column
April 25, 2005 1:57pm
Knight-Ridder / Tribune Business News

Apr. 25--PAYING THE PRICE FOR NUCLEAR POWER

IT is pretty well taken for granted that once the election is out of the way, the Government will renew its commitment to nuclear energy.

Hints to this effect have been dropped since last autumn, and in recent months the efforts by the likes of Amec and BNFL to lead an informed debate about the benefits of nuclear power, coupled with blunt warnings from the electricity industry that it may not be able to maintain supplies, have led to more and more stories surfacing about the Prime Minister's conviction that nuclear is the only way to deliver the energy the country needs without adding to carbon emissions.

The issue is quite simple. No one doubts the Government's commitment to renewable energy and particularly wind farms, even though they are expensive. But what is missing is an understanding that we get 20 percent of our electricity from ageing nuclear reactors which will have to be phased out over the next 10 to 15 years. So while wind power might cope with the growth in demand, it cannot also pick up the 20 percent extra that will be needed when the nuclear plant is decommissioned.

The question is how to fill that gap and maintain our commitment to cut carbon emissions. Coal, oil and gas are out, so the only coherent answer is to build replacement nuclear plants, probably on the same sites as the current ones to avoid lengthy planning delays.

Interestingly, what no one talks about is cost and who is going to pay for them, although in many ways that is the biggest challenge. When the first generation of reactors was built, power generation was still in state hands, and government coughed up the billions needed. This time, the private companies generating Britain's power will have to find the billions themselves, which means, of course, that the City will have to come up with the money. But is this realistic in the current market environment? The free-for-all electricity market and falling prices sent British Energy bust two years ago. The risk is all too obvious.

If the Government wants nuclear power, it is going to have to fix the electricity market so there is a guaranteed minimum price for the baseload that nuclear energy will supply. The implications of that are profound, and this debate has a long way to go.

[pc4900074200] 26/4/2005 06:33

Telegragh. 26-04-2005.

British Energy calms nerves of investors
By Philip Aldrick

British Energy settled investors' nerves yesterday by announcing that its annual nuclear output for the next two years was expected to average 63 terrawatt hours (TWh), in line with forecasts.

The shares closed 1½ higher at 325½p after its post year-end update.

The company, which returned to the stock market only in January after its near-collapse in 2003, is expected to announce results for the year to March in July, "to accommodate work in respect of transition" to international accounting standards.

Output from its eight nuclear stations last year was 59.8TWh, and 7.6TWh at its coal-fired Eggborough plant.

Cash balances were £450m and the company said capital investment would total £230m-£250m in 2006. Future selling prices were subject to market volatility.

pc