“Live better electrically.” Remember that slogan? It used to be how Ontario Hydro, formerly the world’s biggest electric utility, promoted its product, electricity. With that slogan, Hydro promised customers a better life if they used more of its product. Though the slogan,…
Category: Westinghouse nuclear
A cold-blooded look at the CANDU: problems and opportunities
“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…
Fragile pro-nuclear consensus emerges in U.S., but wait for the green/gas counterattack
Jacques Besnainou, CEO of Areva North America, on Monday applauded the Obama administration’s decision in February to award federal nuclear loan guarantees to The Southern Company. Southern will use the guarantees to borrow US$3.4 billion to build two Westinghouse AP 1000…
Is Areva out of Ontario? And can AECL and Westinghouse dance?
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…
Bankers, power, and plutonium: should Canada really drop the CANDU?
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…