To no one’s surprise, the Canadian government has announced it wants to sell the reactor part of Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL). What exactly that entails is not clear. The government says it is open to any and all offers, from some kind of public-private partnership to full 100 percent private ownership. It looks like […]

How should Canada resolve the medical isotope crisis? A new report says we should build a new multi-purpose research reactor which can produce isotopes on the side.  Though this is the most expensive of the options presented, the authors point out the impressive benefits a multi-purpose reactor would offer. The logic of this recommendation will, […]

It costs $3 million to have a nuclear reactor design reviewed by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Compared with other nuclear expenditures that’s not a huge amount of money. So when Areva, the French nuclear giant, decided to halt its CNSC design review, you have to wonder if Areve just saw the writing on the […]

Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman dictator whose ex post facto victory over the original Hannibal has for centuries inspired both admiration and contempt, would applaud the strategies of the major players in the Ontario nuclear reactor competition. The major players are the governments of Ontario and Canada. The decision strategy of each is pure Fabius: […]

Think big or go home. That used to be the Ontario way: anybody who has looked at Ontario’s three nuclear power plants knows that the people who built them were big thinkers and big doers. No surprise then that the three bidders in the ongoing billion-dollar reactor competition are AECL, Westinghouse, and Areva. And on […]

On the federal government’s map of infrastructure projects, the area along Hwy 401 between Oshawa and Bowmanville shows two projects, each worth less than $1 million. Important though these are—the area is home to many laid-off manufacturing workers—there’s another project that would inject billions of dollars into the Ontario economy and create thousands of high-paid, high-skilled, and […]

Areva is still in the Ontario reactor competition, and remains open to playing a role in the future of Canadian nuclear research, a company executive said in a conference call on September 18. This follows the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s announcement on August 31 that it sees “no fundamental barriers” to licensing the new CANDU reactor in Canada. AECL, […]

Information leaked to the Toronto Star on July 14 provides fuel for interesting speculation on what we could call the political economy of the Ontario nuclear reactor competition. Two sources, one reported to be directly involved with one of the bids, are the basis for the Star’s claim that AECL’s bid was $26 billion and Areva’s $23.6 billion. Areva […]

In their brilliant book Smart Choices, Hammond Keeney & Raiffa warn against falling into the “anchoring trap”—a psychological quirk which makes human decision-makers glom onto the first number they see and base subsequent decisions on that number. If the number is wrong, or out of context, those subsequent decisions could be disastrous. On Tuesday of […]

Last month the Canadian federal government announced it was going to privatize Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL). The medical isotope part of the business would be separated from power reactors. The feds hoped that this would thereby ease Ontario’s troubled mind as the province, in the middle of finalizing its choice of a vendor to […]