“Look what happened to the CANDU,” a senior official at Rosatom, the Russian nuclear conglomerate, recently told Platts. “It’s a good reactor, but nobody is building it.” Why the post mortem, for a reactor that at six a.m. today was cranking out 62.6 percent of Ontario’s electricity? Because, said the official, a Rosatom analysis indicates that if you […]

I recently visited the Flamanville nuclear generating station on the channel coast in Normandy, where the French electric utility, EDF, is building a new 1,650-megawatt EPR reactor. Two thousand seven hundred contractors, split into three shifts of 900 each, work around the clock six days a week to get the thing done. The locals in […]

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 […]

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 […]

When unit 2 at the Bruce nuclear plant comes back online this fall after a 14-year layup, it will, every year, inject around 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours of cheap, carbon-free power into Ontario’s grid. How much carbon will it offset? Between 3.5 and 6.5 million tonnes. At the often-mentioned price of $15 per tonne of carbon, Bruce 2 would save […]

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Last week, the Ontario government announced it is delaying its decision on which reactor design to choose for the planned construction project at the Darlington generating station. What underlies Ontario’s skittishness is the fact that none of the three competing reactor designs is currently in […]

Ontario has delayed the nuclear reactor competition yet again, citing the international financial crisis and the tightening of credit markets. According to Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman, Ontario’s need in these circumstances for assurance against construction cost overruns is even more emphatically underlined

A couple weeks ago, the French nuclear utility, EDF, offered to buy British Energy, its UK counterpart, for the equivalent of around $22.8 billion Canadian. More recently, EDF tried to elbow Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings out of the bid to acquire Constellation Energy, a Baltimore-based electric utility whose generating fleet includes five nuclear reactors