Europe's aging nuclear plants will undergo more prolonged outages over the next few years, reducing the reliability of power supply and costing operators many billions of dollars.
Nuclear power provides about a third of the European Union's electricity generation, but the 28-nation bloc's 131 reactors are well past their prime, with an average age of 30 years.
And the energy companies, already feeling the pinch from falling energy prices and weak demand, want to extend the life of their plants into the 2020s to put off the drain of funding new builds.