Duncan Hawthorne, CEO of Horizon Nuclear Power, says a consensus is forming across government and industry that the Hinkley financing model - which involved EDF and its Chinese partner CGN covering the entire cost of construction - will not be repeated, according to his comments to the Financial Times published yesterday. Horizon is the UK subsidiary of Hitachi-GE, which regulators informed last week had successfully completed the Generic Design Assessment process for its UK Advanced Boiling Water Reactor.

World Nuclear Association yesterday presented its Harmony programme to members of Foratom, the Brussels-based trade association for the nuclear energy industry in Europe. Harmony is the nuclear industry vision for the future of electricity and how nuclear energy can help the world achieve its 2-degree climate target.

The World Bank Group has announced that it will no longer finance upstream oil and gas, after 2019. It was one of several moves announced by the group at the One Planet Summit held in Paris today.

Nuclear power accounted for a fifth of total electricity produced in the UK last year and it remains the largest single source of low carbon electricity in the UK, providing 46% of the low carbon electricity produced, with wind, solar, hydro and biomass providing the remainder, according to the Nuclear Industry Association's first Activity Report, issued today. With two-thirds of all dispatchable power capacity retiring between 2010 and 2030, including all but one of the country's existing nuclear stations, the NIA warns that this will need to be replaced with a new fleet to continue providing the reliable, secure low carbon power the UK will need.

The state of New York's Zero-Emissions Credit programme, which will compensate nuclear plants for continued operation, is a logical extension of similar renewable energy credit programmes, the US Nuclear Energy Institute  has told a federal appeals court. Meanwhile, Michael Shellenberger - head of the Environmental Progress environmental research and policy organisation, which campaigned to support the New York initiative - has announced his intention to run for governor of California.

The European Commission has published its third report on progress made in delivering and implementing the Energy Union. European trade body Foratom has again highlighted the importance of nuclear energy in achieving the project's objectives.

The House of Commons public accounts committee has concluded that UK households have been dealt a "bad hand" by the cost of the so-called strike price - the fixed cost for electricity generated - for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project in Somerset, England. The committee of British members of parliament scrutinised the terms of the contract-for-difference agreed between the government and the planned plant's operator EDF.

Harmonising the training of contractors to access multiple nuclear facilities in the USA is one example of ensuring safety amid pressures on the industry to cut costs and remain competitive, Peter Prozesky, CEO of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, told World Nuclear News in a recent interview. This approach is one answer to the industry's need to align its procedures, as outlined in World Nuclear Association’s Harmony initiative, he added.

If the United Nations' sustainability goals are to be met, nuclear energy will need to provide at least 15% of the world's electricity by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It notes that China continues to lead a gradual rise in nuclear output and is expected to overtake the USA by 2030 to become the largest producer of nuclear electricity.

Germany's Energiewende policy has made things worse for the climate by shutting down carbon-free nuclear capacity and locking in the dependency on coal burning for decades, despite hundreds of billions in investments and subsidy-schemes. This is the conclusion of the European Climate Leadership Report 2017, Measuring the Metrics that Matter published last week in Bonn, Germany, at Conference of the Parties 23 by the NGO Energy for Humanity.

National pledges made under the Paris Climate Change Agreement will only achieve a third of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions required by 2030 to meet climate targets, a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme has found. In response, the director general of World Nuclear Association, Agneta Rising, said the importance of nuclear energy in meeting climate targets cannot be overstated.

The French government will come up with a more "realistic" target to reduce the share of nuclear energy in the country's electricity generation, Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot told a news conference in Paris today.