Yesterday British Energys shares fell 23% in a day knocking £1.30p of the share price value, or several hundred million off the value of the company. This all came about after they released output data for the rest of the financial year which suggested that boiler cracking at both Hinkley and Hunstanton are much worsethan had predicted and that they would have to come off-line for longer. This is partly due to only have one set of engineers who can look at the problems.

BE's out put is forecast to 5-10TWh less than originally anticipated.

Power prices hardly responded to this news with both November and December ticking up marginally, but given the effect on supply one might have expected greater increases. In fact they would have been greater if gas prices had remained constant but this did not happen with a small drop in oil prices and the gas price falling due to over supply. (Brittania was due to return the fact that it did not and the system was more than capable of coping suggests that the gas price has further to fall.)

So with one bull story in nuclear more bearish news comes out of the gas market.