The US nuclear industry has adopted an initiative to procure additional on-site portable equipment so that every commercial nuclear facility in the country can respond safely to extreme events.

EDF has posted strong results for the last year, with nuclear generation up by enough to counter an 'exceptionally poor' year for hydroelectricity. EDF's nuclear power plants in France and the UK generated 421.1 TWh and 55.8 TWh respectively, beating targets and up on 2010 performance by 13 TWh. The UK's Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor fleet posted its best performance for six years.

Upgrade work will enable the lives of three RBMK reactors at the Smolensk site in Russia to be extended until the first new unit of a replacement plant is up, according to Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko.

Upgrade work will enable the lives of three RBMK reactors at the Smolensk site in Russia to be extended until the first new unit of a replacement plant is up, according to Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko.

Investing in new nuclear generating capacity or any other form of energy would be too expensive and come online too late, France's state audit office has concluded. Extending the operating lives of its existing nuclear power reactors would be its best option.

Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin has won a contract to install reactor containment filtration systems at the Cernavoda nuclear power plant in Romania. SNC-Lavalin has in turn contracted Areva to supply the equipment.

Three steam generators from unit 4 of Sweden's Ringhals nuclear power plant have been transported to Studsvik's plant, where they will be processed for recycling and disposal.

Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant has notified the country's Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRA) about its plans to increase the generating capacity of units 5 and 6 by a combined 120 MWe (gross), Bloomberg reported. The uprate would require a licensing change, according to NRA's president, Sergei Tsochev. He said that the agency would be able to issue a new licence to the plant by the end of 2013, provided that it was supplied with all the necessary documents in time. Tsochev noted that the Kozloduy plant will also need to seek approval to extend the operating lives of the two Russian-supplied VVER-1000 units four years before their current licences are due to expire, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In June 2011, Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borissov said that the country will seek to extend the reactors' operation by ten years. "To allow a service life extension, we need to examine the aging of the reactors and to have part of the equipment replaced," Tsochev said.

Six new nuclear power reactors were connected to the world's electricity grids in 2011, adding over 4000 MWe of generation capacity. Thirteen units were closed permanently, all but one as a direct result of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi.

Unit 1 of the Point Beach nuclear power plant in Wisconsin has restarted following a 17% increase in its licensed power, NextEra Energy announced. In April 2009, the company requested permission from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to increase the capacity of each of the pressurized water reactors at the site from 512 MWe to 600 MWe. In early May 2011, the NRC determined that NextEra could safely raise output of the units primarily by carrying out significant upgrades to several plant systems and components, including safety-related pumps and valves, as well as the turbine-generator sets. The work to upgrade unit 1 was conducted during a routine maintenance and refuelling outage that began on 3 October. NextEra implemented a similar uprate of unit 2 during a refuelling outage earlier this year.

Areva has won a contract to upgrade monitoring and control systems for EDF's 20 largest reactors across eight power plants.