Nuclear war: energy

If Steve Hamilton needs an energy boost in his efforts to sell one of his company’s French-designed nuclear reactors, he can always stroll down to the beach near his office in Pickering, Ont., and take a look across the bay. Just a few hundred metres down the shore sits the giant Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, home to eight Canadian-made Candu reactors, two of which cost taxpayers billions, worked intermittently, died young and are now nothing more than radioactive junk awaiting cleanup at further massive public expense. As the Canadian head of the French nuclear giant Areva, which has built 65 reactors worldwide, Hamilton knows better than most that the two defunct Pickering reactors, designed by federally owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), represent years of heartbreak for Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG), the electrical utility that ran them, along with 18 other Candus, six of which have required expensive rebuilds.
Hamilton doesn’t deny the troubled Candus represent an opportunity that Areva plans to pursue aggressively. But it’s not his style to dwell on a competitor’s failures. “Our approach hasn’t been to put theirs down, and build ours up,” says Hamilton, who moved from North Carolina two years ago to help Areva’s reactor services division set up shop in Ontario. “It’s just a presentation of the facts.”

Areva is not the only international reactor manufacturer pushing to get its version of the facts known. In Ontario, the government has promised to shut down coal-burning electrical stations by 2009, and power planners say $70 billion will have to be invested in new generating facilities, including nuclear plants over the next 20 years. At a February nuclear industry conference in Ottawa, reactor marketing teams from as far away as South Korea were on hand to promote their wares and hear speeches by top industry and government officials endorsing Ontario’s need for new reactors, something not contemplated since the early 1980s when AECL secured its monopoly status in Canada.

Canadian Business