Merchant bankers and other City advisers are already running their slide rules over the business

Merchant bankers and other City advisers are already running their slide rules over the business. The Government has yet to appoint its adviser on the sale, but a price tag of £3bn has been mooted and some experts believe it could fetch up to £6bn.Privately owned nuclear stations are not unusual. Outside Britain, the majority are already in the private sector, including plants in the United States, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Germany and Japan.Flotation looks the most likely sale option. Any attempt to lower the safety standards imposed on the British nuclear industry ahead of the sell-off would quite rightly be greeted with howls of protest. But as long as the safety question can be resolved, the politics look possible.Financially, too, it can be done, according to my soundings in the City.

We already know that the plan is to marry Nuclear Electric with Scottish Nuclear and privatise the merged organisation. It will, however, first be shorn of the unsaleable bits - the Magnox generators, the oldest nuclear plants, whose decommissioning costs remain unquantifiable but probably horrendous. These will be transferred to BNFL, which remains in the public sector. Politically, nuclear privatisation is a hottish potato - but probably less controversial than attempts to sell the railways (ongoing) or the Post Office (shelved). WHAT would have been unthinkable 10 years ago and proved unworkable five years ago is back on the political agenda The Government is to privatise the nuclear power industry Details are expected in a White Paper due on Tuesday. Headline inflation, including mortgage interest, has edged up in the past few months to 3.5 per cent and the underlying rate has reached 2.8 per cent, mainly because of the rise in commodity prices and the decline in the value of the pound against the mark, yen and Swiss franc.Some economists argue that the case for a rise in rates to control domestic demand was weak and has weakened further since the last increase three months ago, as the growth of output and consumption has visibly decelerated..

If Jacques Chirac should be defeated today by the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, the franc would go into free-fall.Speculation surrounding the two European currencies should take some of the heat off the US dollar, which has been pulling the pound down with it.Pressure for a further rise in UK base rates has been generated by the currency and bond markets and is unlikely to disappear quickly. If sterling continues to fall this week, he is going to look pretty stupid if he has to shore it up with an increase in base rate by Friday."Sterling will share the spotlight this week with the French franc, as markets react to the result of the French presidential election. THE pound and French franc are expected to come under pressure when the foreign exchange markets re-open in Asia at midnight, in the wake of today's French presidential election and Friday's decision by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke, to leave interest rates unchanged. Mr Clarke's comments on this morning's Frost on Sunday BBC television programme will be carefully analysed for an explanation of his interest- rate decision, despite rising raw material costs, an already weak pound and surging money market rates. The suspicion is gaining ground that Mr Clarke is preparing to relax the chains that have been holding inflation back, which would imply a potentially damaging disagreement with Eddie George, the Governor of the Bank of England.Said one dealer: "Clarke has some explaining to do. We were trying to work between friends and Mr Saatchi is not of this calibre." Mr Louis- Dreyfus initially persuaded the Saatchi brothers to join him in a purchase of some Adidas stock, an investment that included an option to buy further shares in the company.Later on, the brothers felt that Mr Louis-Dreyfus was planning to circumvent the option and cut them out. They won an injunction against him in the British High Court and launched legal action against him in France, Belgium and Germany.Last December, two weeks before the fateful board meeting, the legal wrangle between Mr Louis-Dreyfus and the brothers came to an end when the Saatchis' interest in the Adidas option was bought out for $38m.. Last week, it emerged that the New Saatchi agency in turn might be taking legal action against Cordiant to prevent a report being sent to shareholders containing details about the brothers' pension arrangements.One of Adidas's shareholders, Christian Tourres, is quoted as saying in the article: "(Maurice) Saatchi is absolutely ruthless.