Platts - Monday, June 07, 2004 http://www.platts.com ------------ UK's British Energy hires Roy Anderson as chief nuclear officer London (Platts)--7Jun2004 British Energy has hired Roy Anderson as chief nuclear officer, the troubled UK generator said Monday. He will be responsible for the operation of British Energy's fleet of eight UK nuclear power generation stations. Anderson will be a member of the company's executive committee reporting to chief executive Mike Alexander. He will join BE on Jul 5 from New Jersey-based PSEG Nuclear in the US where he is president, responsible for all nuclear production. He was previously chief nuclear officer of Nuclear Management Company and before that of Florida Power Corporation. His earlier career spanned Caroline Power & Light Company, Boston Edison Company and General Electric Company. "Roy has significant experience of nuclear turnarounds and his experience will be invaluable to British Energy as we progress the Performance Improvement Programme. He joins at an important time in the restructuring of the company," Alexander said. ------------ British Energy's UK May nuclear output falls 15% y-o-y to 4.94TWh London (Platts)--7Jun2004 Output at British Energy's UK nuclear power plants in May fell by 15% to 4.94TWh compared with the same period a year earlier , it said Monday. Output at the company's nuclear fleet since the start of its reporting year on Apr 1 fell 10% to 10.07TWh compared with the same period a year earlier, it said. BE said one generating unit at its 1.188GW Sizewell B plant had been shut since Apr 19 to replace an alternator rotor which had an earth fault. BE sources told Platts Friday it is expected to return to operations before the end of the week (Jun 13). The other unit at the plant continues to operate at nominal full load, it said. In another unplanned outage, a planned outage at the 1.250GW Torness plant in Scotland to carry out boiler instrumentation modifications was extended to carry out additional work to restore boiler performance. As a result one reactor at the plant was shut down for most of May, BE said. BE's Heysham 2, Dungeness B and Hunterston B plants were each affected by less significant unplanned outages during the month, it said. ------------ GAO warns Russian shutdown costs may double Washington (Platts)--4Jun2004 The costs of shutting down Russia's three plutonium production reactors could more than double, to about $1- billion, the General Accounting Office (GAO) said in a report issued today. As part of its nonproliferation program, the U.S. is funding construction of fossil- fueled plants to provide replacement power after the shutdown of the three reactors--two at Seversk and one at Zheleznogorsk. The GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress, said the project "is becoming an increasingly risky undertaking for DOE." In addition to the financial concerns, there are "serious questions about [Russia's] commitment to the nonproliferation and safety-related goals of DOE's program," the GAO said. The report, GAO-04-662, is available on GAO's Web site (http://www.gao.gov). ------------