A consortium of governments will build a groundbreaking fusion power plant in France for a price in excess of €5 billion. After decades of discouraging setbacks, plasma physics has made jaw-dropping recent progress. Could it save the world?
Something went wrong during reactor experiment number 23,995. The fusion process started, continued for a second, but suddenly [...]

Japan’s second largest trading company Mitsui & Co has acquired a 49 per cent stake in the Australian assets of Canadian uranium miner Uranium One after regulators approved the joint venture deal.
The assets include Uranium One’s Honeymoon project in South Australia, where trial mining was undertaken between 1998 and 2000, and its nearby Goulds Dam [...]

Oil prices fell further below $40 in Asian trade on Tuesday in a market plagued by weak energy demand, dealers said.
New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for delivery in February, shed 77 cents to $39.14 a barrel in morning trade after sliding $2.45 to close at $39.91 on the New York Mercantile Exchange [...]

Light, sweet crude for February delivery fell $2.45, or nearly 6 percent, to settle at $39.91 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
By the Associated Press
Oil prices tumbled below $40 a barrel Monday as reports from manufacturers like Toyota and Caterpillar pointed to a worsening global economic climate and serious deterioration in energy demand.
Light, [...]

THE outlook for Australia’s coal exporters has continued to weaken, with reports of further falls in contract thermal coal prices.
Japanese newsletter The Tex Report said first coal contracts for Japan’s next financial year had been signed, with utilities getting coal at the export port at between $US70 and $US80 a tonne — up to a [...]

By Angela Macdonald-Smith
Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) – Xstrata Plc, the world’s biggest exporter of coal burned in power plants, agreed annual calendar- year contracts for the fuel with Japanese utilities at lower prices, Citigroup Inc. said.
Contracts for coal to be delivered in the year starting Jan. 1, 2009, have been settled at $80 a metric [...]

TOKYO (Reuters) – Oil headed lower for the first time in three days on Friday, after jumping nearly $6 in the past two days as the OPEC president called for more “severe” production cuts at its meeting next week.
By 0018 GMT (7:18 p.m. EST on Thursday evening), crude for January delivery traded down $1.15 at [...]

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Oil rebounded by more than $1 a barrel to under $44 in light bargain hunting on Wednesday, after slumping 4 percent overnight on the back of lowered forecasts for U.S. energy demand and fears of a deepening global recession.
The market is looking ahead to producer cartel OPEC’s December 17 meeting, which is [...]

By Shigeru Sato and Yuji Okada
Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil rebounded from six days of declines as OPEC’s president said the group may make a “significant” output reduction and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama pledged the biggest public works program in about 50 years.
A “severe” cut may be needed to halt the more than [...]

By Will Kennedy
Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Nippon Oil Corp., Japan’s largest oil refiner, and Nippon Mining Holdings Inc. will merge next year, the Nikkei newspaper reported.
The tie-up, creating Japan’s fourth-largest company by sales, will be announced by the presidents of both companies later today, a version of the report published by Nikkei English News [...]