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A US appeals court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to delay implementing new rules designed to limit interstate air pollution due to go into effect on January 1, offering a boost to power companies who oppose the regulations.

Friday’s decision means that new restrictions on sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants in the eastern part of the US will not go into force until the court has had a chance to review them in more detail.

Since the EPA released the rules in July, they have provoked a storm of controversy. Power producers in Texas were particularly outspoken, arguing that the tough limits and short timeline would force them to shut down plants and lay off workers.

The EPA has stepped up efforts to reduce air pollution in recent months, insisting that new regulations are vital to prevent power stations releasing harmful emissions that cross state lines and damage the health of millions of Americans.

On Friday, a spokesperson for the EPA said the ruling was “disappointing” but noted that the “decision is not a decision on the merits of the rule and EPA firmly believes that when the court does weigh the merits of the rule, it will ultimately be upheld.”

Meanwhile, Luminant, a subsidiary of Energy Future Holdings and the largest competitive power generation business in Texas, welcomed the court decision and said that it would keep open two units it had planned to idle from January.

“Today’s decision allows valued employees across our system to continue working on important generation, mining and other operations … providing needed generation for the Texas electric market,” the company said.

Few things induce panic as quickly as exposed nuclear fuel rods. So it is no wonder that pictures of their eerie glow inside the destroyed nuclear power plant at Fukushima shocked governments into reassessing their attitudes towards their favoured methods of power generation. Indeed, only weeks after the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March, Germany’s anti-nuclear Green party made strong headway at state elections. Swiss authorities have, for now, abandoned plans for new nuclear power plants, while China put its aggressive expansion on hold.

But in spite of the worst atomic accident in 25 years, nuclear power is here to stay. The plants are reliable, usually cost less to run than conventional fuel plants and, once operational, emit virtually no greenhouse gases. Investors seem to agree. Although clean energy stocks experienced a short jump in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese nuclear incident, since then they have lost about half their value. In contrast, global nuclear energy benchmarks have lost less than one-third of their value since March.

It is also easy to forget that the Fukushima plant was designed in the 1960s. Current models, such as those made by Areva, contain additional layers of safety controls. And in the same way that the maintenance of aeroplanes is more closely scrutinised than that of cars, even though the former mode of transport is far safer, the dramatic nature of a nuclear accident can easily gloss over the fact that coal-fired power plants are indirectly responsible for far more deaths from respiratory and related illnesses. And that is before considering the pesky issue of global warming.

The push towards clean non-nuclear energy will continue but it would probably take further technological breakthroughs to relegate nuclear energy to the history books.

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A plan by Russia to build a new gas route to southern Europe gained momentum on Wednesday after Turkey agreed to host the Black Sea section of the pipeline in its territorial waters.

Taner Yildiz, the Turkish energy minister, handed Vladimir Putin, Russian prime minister, written permission for the construction of the South Stream pipeline across the Black Sea, removing a big obstacle to a project that is central to Russia’s plan to tighten its grip on European gas markets.

Turkish approval for South Stream was hailed by Mr Putin as “a big event in Europe’s energy sphere”.

South Stream will transport up to 63bn cubic metres a year of Russian gas to south and central Europe from 2015, reducing Russia’s overwhelming dependence on gas export routes across Ukraine. In November, the first Russian gas was pumped to Germany under the Baltic Sea through the new Nord Stream pipeline, which will carry 55bn cubic metres of gas by 2013.

The $20bn South Stream project is seen as a competitor to the European Union-backed Nabucco pipeline to ship Caspian and central Asian gas to Europe and reduce reliance on Russian energy supplies. But Turkey, which is carving a role as an east-west energy transit hub, said the two pipelines should complement each other.

Nabucco’s future has looked uncertain as investors struggle to identify gas supplies to fill the 32bn cubic metres a year pipeline and justify the €12bn-€15bn construction costs.

Azerbaijan is being courted by rival pipeline groups for rights to ship gas from the BP-operated Shah Deniz field across Turkey to Europe. It warned this month the Nabucco project might be too ambitious to suit its near-term needs.

In another blow to Nabucco’s prospects, Turkey this week signed a preliminary deal with Azerbaijan to build a pipeline to carry up to 16bn cubic metres of gas a year from Shah Deniz to the Turkish-Bulgarian border.

Russia’s Gazprom has teamed up with Germany’s Wintershall, Eni of Italy and Électricité de France to build the 900km offshore section of South Stream to link southern Russia with Bulgaria.

Analysts have predicted the Russian gas monopoly would abandon South Stream if it succeeded in its goal to gain control of Ukraine’s gas transit network, which carries about 80 per cent of Russia’s gas exports to Europe. But Alexei Miller, Gazprom chief executive, pledged on Wednesday to press ahead with South Stream, saying Turkey’s approval was “the most serious proof that the project” would be complete by the 2015 schedule.

Concern about Europe’s dependence on Russian gas was underscored this month when the EU blocked a plan by Gazprom to buy a 50 per cent stake in the Central European Gas Hub in Austria on the grounds the deal contradicted EU liberalisation laws. Gazprom reacted by altering the route of South Stream to end in Italy, rather than in Austria.

The European Commission said yesterday the South Stream deal did not affect its commitments to the Nabucco route.

After receiving permission to build South Stream on Wednesday, Gazprom said two long-term gas supply contracts with Turkey would be extended to 2021 and 2025 and pledged to increase deliveries to Turkey in 2012. Turkey told Gazprom in October it would halt imports of Russian gas through a pipeline across Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria after failing to agree a discount on supplies. It was not clear whether Gazprom had agreed to reduce the gas price it charges Turkey in exchange for permission to build South Stream.

Additional reporting by Peter Spiegel in Brussels
●A natural gas field off Cyprus holds an estimated 5-8tn cubic feet (140-230bn cubic metres), a significant find for the island, the country’s president announced on Wednesday.

The operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant and its regulators all failed in their duty to adequately prepare for and respond promptly to a major emergency, contributing to the worst nuclear accident in a quarter century, according to a committee investigating the disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the Fukushima plant, and its regulators were so unprepared for a major nuclear emergency that they lacked even the basic safety measures to respond to a disaster of the scale that hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of the March 11 tsunami, the committee states in an interim report of its findings.

Tepco’s off-site emergency response headquarters for example, was housed in a building that “was not designed to withstand elevated radiation levels, although it was intended for use in nuclear emergencies”, and did not even have air cleaning filters, it says.

“Tepco did not take precautionary measures in anticipation that a severe accident could be caused by tsunami such as the one (that hit Fukushima Daiichi) … Neither did the regulatory authorities,” the committee states in its report.

The committee of 10 independent experts, which was commissioned by the government, also cites insufficient information gathering and poor communication among those in the government, the regulators and at Tepco as major factors that worsened the situation.

“When the integrated responses by the entire government set-up of are critical importance, there was insufficient communication” between the nuclear emergency response headquarters at the prime minister’s office, and the emergency gathering of relevant ministries.

Even though they were frustrated by the slow flow of information from Tepco, the regulators’ emergency response teams failed to send members to Tepco headquarters or even install a teleconferencing system.

The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan’s northeastern coast, led to explosions at three reactors and the release of high levels of radioactivity into the atmosphere and ocean.

An area of up to 20km from the site has been closed off, more than 110,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes and concerns about radioactive contamination plague farmers, fishermen and consumers alike.

The committee spent seven months inspecting sites and interviewing as many as 456 people before publishing its interim report, which is the first official attempt to analyse the causes behind one of the worst nuclear accidents in recent history.

The report, which is highly critical of Tepco as well as the authorities, contrasts with the conclusions of a separate exercise by Tepco, which laid blame for the crisis squarely on the natural disaster.

It comes as the utility faces the prospect of nationalisation, to prevent bankruptcy, as the costs of compensating victims and decommissioning the damaged power plants threaten to increase liabilities in excess of assets.

The committee’s report also criticises Tepco for a lack of understanding among those responsible, including top management, of the company’s own mechanisms to deal with emergencies.

For example, the isolation condensers at reactor unit 1 lost their functionality after the tsunami struck, making it necessary to provide alternative water injection to cool the reactor core.

The committee states that, “misjudgment of the operational situation of the IC caused (a) delay in alternative water injection and primary containment vessel (PCV) venting. As a result, an earlier opportunity for core cooling was missed”.

The committee, which is set to continue its investigation until next summer, concludes that Japan’s nuclear disaster prevention programme “had serious shortfalls” and calls for a “paradigm shift” in the country’s approach to disaster prevention.