Germany's E.ON AG (EOAN.XE) has been buying up farmland in south Gloucestershire as it firms up plans to build a GBP4 billion nuclear power station beside the River Severn, U.K. newspaper The Times reports Friday.
A spokeswoman for E.ON confirmed it had acquired several tracts of privately owned land in recent months around an existing nuclear site at Oldbury-on-Severn, north of Bristol, which is owned by the U.K. government through the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The NDA site has two 225 megawatt Magnox reactors that have been operating since 1967 but are scheduled to be retired from service at the end of the year.
Buying extra land around the current compact site could allow E.ON to build a European Pressure Reactor, which is far bigger and would generate 1,600 MW of electricity - enough to power a city of a million people.
The spokeswoman said that E.ON was looking at a variety of potential sites for new nuclear stations, of which Oldbury was only one.