New deputy chairman for Hitachi Europe
As Japan's Hitachi increases its presence in the European nuclear energy market, Masaharu Hanyu has been appointed as deputy chairman of Hitachi Europe Ltd and chief executive of the company's nuclear power systems business in Europe.
Hanyu joined Hitachi in 1975 and currently serves as vice president and executive officer, CEO of nuclear systems and general manager of the nuclear systems division and the global nuclear energy business division of Hitachi's power systems group. He served as president and representative director of Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd - the joint venture between Hitachi and General Electric - between July 2007 and March 2011. Hanyu will assume his new position on 1 April.
The Japanese technology giant bought up the UK's Horizon Nuclear Power project for £696 million ($1.1 billion) in late October 2012 from German utilities EOn and RWE, complete with 90 staff and rights to land at two current nuclear sites, Wylfa and Oldbury. Hitachi said it will build up Horizon to take the role of owner-operator of the new power plants, now to be based on GE-Hitachi's Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR), leaving Hitachi to find suitable partners to achieve this. The first of six potential ABWRs in the UK should operate in the first half of the 2020s.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Hitachi won the tender in May 2011 to build Lithuania's Visaginas project, agreeing to take a 20% stake in the project which will produce around 1350 MWe from a single ABWR. GE-Hitachi also recently submitted a proposal based on its Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) in the tender for a fourth unit at Finland's Olkiluoto plant. Polish utility Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA (PGE) has also signed a non-exclusive agreement with GE-Hitachi to investigate the use of ESBWR technology in the country's first nuclear power plant.
Researched and written
by World Nuclear News
