to find a single piece of news in French on this, as of tonight. Will try again tomorrow.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

This is just off the cuff but as I recall the nuclear plant in Italy was closed through a national referendum before it was fully operative in the 80's. However Italy had always had a substantial share in the superphoenix and perhaps other French ventures.

The irony was that Italy was working in a nuclear plant just across the border all the time.

There have been talks of bringing the issue up again after this 20-odd year moratorium.

As far as I can see the problem is a hell of lot more complex than what you depict. The Finland plant will not be operative until at least 2010. That's 13 years to build a plant. Nuclear plants appear to be high financial risks because of the variations in costs of energy. According to Steve Thomas of the University of Greenwich a plant has to run 60 years at 85% capacity to repay itself at a stable cost of kilowatt-hours. France's EdF can write off losses to consumers while in Finland the shareholders are the major consumers. Sort of captive markets. In Britain the government had to bail out British Energy in 2002 to avoid bankruptcy.

As for the EdF-Enel accord, it dates back to 2005 and seems nothing more than a classic business operation, certainly not "begging." There is a hell of a lot of under-the-table kicking in the story that involves protectionist actions first by the Italians against EdF on the Italian market and recently by the French in the Gaz de France-Suez merger. That Edf reneged on Flamanville is news to me, nor have I found anything in the press on it.

Enel did buy 66% of Slovenske Elektrarne which has nuclear plants in April 2006.

The Total Cost of an energy plant is:

Cost of Build + Cost of Operation (Fuel plus Maintenance/Management) + Cost of Decommissioning

"Fuel" costs for renewables like tidal, wind and solar are zero: costs of Operation are also minimal.

Now it seems to me that not only is the fuel cost of nuclear non-zero, but that it can only go one way - particularly in terms of the "energy cost" of fuel extraction/production.

I am not sure about the costs of nuclear decommissioning, but it seems to me that in relative terms at least decommissioning renewables is again hugely financially superior to nuclear.

So unless I am missing something, the total cost of energy produced over time (I am leaving financing costs out of this) is relatively certain for renewables, and relatively uncertain for nuclear.

So while nuclear energy may be "cheap" now, is it REALLY going to stack up relative to renewables over the long term......

Using the "asset-based" (as opposed to conventional debt/equity) financial model I advocate - which is simply to sell a proportion of the "Energy Pool" of future production to Investors at current prices or even a discount - most renewable energy projects stack up at current prices and are literally "self funding".

But I can't really use the model for nuclear because of the unknown costs of fuel and decommissioning.

I read you as saying "I am pro nuclear and that´s that!"  I fail to find a point in the rest of assumptions and assertions.

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

Decisions about a national anti-nuclear policy always involve the participation of Greenpeace, Greenpeace being an international religious cult that, much as certain religious sects deny evolution, denies that the only alternative to nuclear power is to burn more fossil fuels.

You probably think you have done this already, but please spell out your requirements for energy sources that rule out renewable energy as an alternative to nuclear.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

cannot make napalm from oil in a few moments if they choose to do so.

You have a very poor understanding of nuclear technology, I think.

The list of countries that cannot make nuclear weapons simply is rather long and consists of all nations that have nuclear power and not enrichment facilities.   Included among such nations are nations like Belgium, Sweden, Mexico, Argentina (which once had a weapons program and reactors but the weapons program failed, Finland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania...

Two nations have nuclear weapons and no commercial nuclear reactors.   Can you name them?

As for your rather bizarre appreciation of the Manhattan Project "jump starting" nuclear power, how is it exactly that even a 50 year head start cannot be overcome with respect to renewable energy?  

Is it your contention that renewable energy looks good because of this failure?   Did discussion of renewable energy begin last week or was it a little earlier?   Is there some way to account for the fact that renewable energy has been enormously politically popular for many decades while people have been protesting nuclear power and still nuclear prevails?

Would you like me to reproduce Admiral Hyman Rickover's 1957 speech on the future of renewable energy (and nuclear energy) or will you take my word that I can produce it?

This may come as a big surprise, but renewable energy is not 20 years old.   It is thousands of years old.  Thus it had a significant head start on nuclear energy, nuclear energy being the only new form of energy discovered in more than a century.   Renewable energy was abandoned by humanity and once was humanity's sole source of energy.  

I would submit that the return on investment in renewable energy, measured in units of energy divided by units of currency has been very small and will have quite some time to go before it catches up to the return provided by nuclear energy.    

In any case, the primary energy produced by nuclear energy is about 30 exajoules per year, making it the largest single greenhouse gas free producer primary energy there is.   If you are imagining that a 470 exajoule per year source of energy can be ignored in times of climate change, you are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

One need not oppose renewable energy to insist that nuclear power, with all its risks - and there are some even though they are grotesquely over stated - is absolutely essential to human survival.

Good story, I haven't been writing enough on the nuclear subject recently.

I guess Enel will have to beg EdF to please let them finance another EPR, in France.

ENEL is also in the process of buying 66% of the Slovak Electric utility which operates six nuclear power reactors, and ENEL's investment plan for SE approved in 2005 by the Slovak government includes EUR 1.6 billion for completion of Mochovce nuclear power plant - 942 MWe gross - by 2011-12.

On top of this there is a 650 MW Westinghouse PWR in Slovenia at Krsko (yes, really spelled like that) which is half owned by Croatia, but I am not aware of plans for new ones. Any Slovenians or Croatians around?

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.