Framatome has been awarded a contract by Kernkraftwerk Gösgen-Däniken to modernise the reactor protection system at the Gösgen nuclear power plant in Switzerland.

EDF has agreed to sell its stake in Swiss nuclear utility Alpiq to the company's other major shareholders, who intend to take it private. The price for EDF's 25.04% share is CHF489 million (USD489.2 million).

Investigations in the three potential siting regions of Jura Ost, Nördlich Lägern and Zürich Nordost will continue in the third and final stage of Switzerland's search for sites to host two geological repositories, the Federal Council has decided.

Switzerland's phased withdrawal from nuclear power presents challenges for maintaining its electricity security, the International Energy Agency says in a report it published yesterday.

Switzerland's national radioactive waste disposal cooperative Nagra has been granted permits for carrying out the first three exploratory boreholes in its search for potential sites to host two geological repositories.

Swiss utility BKW has been issued with a decommissioning order for the Mühleberg nuclear power plant, which is scheduled to permanently shut down at the end of 2019. 

Swiss utility Axpo has received regulatory approval to bring unit 1 of the Beznau nuclear power plant (KKB) back into service this month after evidence it submitted last December proved aluminium oxide inclusions in the reactor pressure vessel do not affect the unit's safety.

A small number of fuel rods supplied to reactors in France and Switzerland have been affected by quality control issues. EDF Group said today that Areva had notified it of quality control deviations on certain rods, which meant the supplier was unable to demonstrate that quality control to substantiate that the leak tightness of those rods had been properly performed.

The UK may, like Switzerland, have to accept limited influence in EU energy policy post Brexit, Jean-Christophe Füeg, head of international energy affairs at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, told British parliamentarians last week. SFOE is part of Switzerland's Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications.

Parties to the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management - known as the Joint Convention - have submitted national reports detailing the steps they are taking to meet their commitments under the convention ahead of next year's review meeting. Sweden's submission reflects a particularly intensive licensing phase for its used fuel management programme.

Switzerland voted in a referendum yesterday to approve a revision to the country's energy policy that promotes the use of renewable energy sources and energy conservation. The revised Federal Energy Act also prohibits the construction of new nuclear power plants.

The Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate has called for the systematic management of the aging of containers in the country's interim radioactive waste storage facilities. The requirement follows the completion of a study into container aging and fuel handling in such facilities.