Westinghouse to buy 50 per cent stake in NuGen Westinghouse, the Japanese-owned engineering group, will announce within days that it is buying a big stake in one of the UK's three nuclear-building consortiums . Westinghouse, which is owned by Toshiba, is expected to announce it is acquiring a 50 per cent share in NuGen, which owns the right to build a nuclear plant near Sellafield in Cumbria. People close to the negotiations say the price tag will be more than £100m. Westinghouse will buy the stake from Iberdrola, the Spanish utility, which is leaving the venture. France's GDF Suez will hold on to its 50 per cent share. Ministers will welcome the deal as a further sign of progress on the UK's nuclear programme . The agreement comes two months after the government clinched a deal with French state-owned group EDF to build the £16bn Hinkley Point C atomic power plant in Somerset. Chinese state-owned group CGN is expected to take a stake in that project. A deal with Westinghouse would mean that all three nuclear projects in the UK have lined up investors from Asia. Figures published by the Treasury this month showed there had been £15bn of overseas investment in UK infrastructure since 2010 and, of that, three-quarters of the agreements have been with investors from China or Japan. Richard Threlfall, head of infrastructure at KPMG, a professional services firm, said the government's attempts to secure money from Asia was clearly having an effect. "Ultimately, there is a lot of interest from that part of the world in the UK above other European countries, largely because of the stable regulatory and political environment," he said. The UK is set to lose about a fifth of its power-generating capacity over the next few years: EU environmental laws will force the closure of ageing coal plants and older nuclear plants are being decommissioned. The government hopes a new generation of reactors will replace these losses and help meet carbon reduction targets. The UK has plans to build at least 12 nuclear reactors by 2030, and has earmarked five sites for development. EDF is scheduled to build plants at Hinkley and Sizewell in Suffolk, while Horizon, a venture owned by Japanese group Hitachi, is to build at Wylfa in North Wales and Oldbury in Gloucestershire, and NuGen at Moorside in Cumbria. The government is introducing generous support for nuclear developers. It guaranteed EDF a price of £92.50 per megawatt hour, roughly double the current price of power, for the electricity it will generate at Hinkley. But that deal will face regulatory scrutiny in Brussels. The European Commission is expected to announce this week that it is launching an investigation into whether the EDF deal breaches EU state aid rules. A ruling is not expected before next summer at the earliest. NuGen was created in 2009 and the same year bought a 190ha plot of land north of Sellafield from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government agency that owns the site, for £70m. It announced plans to build a 3,600MW power station there and was supposed to submit a planning application by the end of 2014. But the project has progressed slowly, and it is thought unlikely to meet that deadline. If it fails, the land it has optioned could revert to the government and be re-auctioned. A person familiar with the matter said that, after the sale of the Iberdrola stake is finalised, NuGen will apply to the NDA for an extension of the option on the Moorside site. He described Westinghouse's entry as the "best of all possible worlds" because its AP1000 reactor design is close to gaining approval from UK regulators, and so could be deployed relatively quickly. For Westinghouse, entering NuGen would be a vindication after it failed last year in its bid to buy Horizon, which was ultimately bought by rival Hitachi. Toshiba has been stepping up its efforts to expand internationally since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, which led to the shutdown of Japan's nuclear reactors.