Source: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/ontario-puts-nuclear-expansion-plans-on-ice/
Two years into a $20 billion nuclear upgrade project meant to replace aging reactors with next-generation technology, the Ontario government postponed the entire process on Monday, citing excessive cost and uncertainties involving the ownership status of the sole Canadian bidder.
“Emission-free nuclear power remains a crucial aspect of Ontario’s supply mix,” Ontario’s minister of energy and infrastructure, George Smitherman, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the competitive bidding process has not provided Ontario with a suitable option at this time.”
As he told reporters, “We’ll know the right price when we see it, and we ain’t seen it yet.”
Nuclear energy provides roughly 50 percent of Ontario’s power needs, according to the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator, and the present government has linked its nuclear energy policy to a promise to close the province’s coal-fired generators by 2014.
Yesterday’s move is a setback for the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the 57-year-old government-owned corporation that has built all of Canada’s reactors and could soon be sold off to a private investor.
The company is looking for the first sale of its untested Gen-III ACR-1000 reactor. Canadian nuclear industry watchers quoted in The Globe and Mail said that if the company couldn’t sell this new model in Canada, it had little chance of securing international deals.
In the first open-bidding process of its kind in Canada, Ontario officials also considered applications from Westinghouse and Areva, the French nuclear giant.
General Electric’s nuclear division didn’t bid because it is a longtime supplier of the company.
To date, Areva is the only nuclear company to have sold a third-generation reactor, to the Finnish electric utility. As James Kanter of Green Inc. reported recently, that project has gone significantly over budget.
Anti-nuclear environmental groups, meanwhile, endorsed Ontario’s move — and at least one group suggested that it represented a shift in energy policy, rather than a stroke of fiscal caution.
In a statement, the Ontario Clean Air Alliance said the government’s actions “hint at a more enlightened approach to Ontario’s energy future –- one that favors plentiful green and clean alternatives over high-cost, high-risk nuclear power.”
Source: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/ontario-puts-nuclear-expansion-plans-on-ice/
