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 percent of Ontario’s electricity? Because, said the official, a Rosatom analysis indicates that if you want to be a profitable reactor vendor, your worldwide installed capacity must be at least 100,000 megawatts. Toshiba-Westinghouse has that, so does Areva. Soon, says the Rosatom official, Russia will too. AECL, which makes the CANDU, has only around a quarter of that putative requirement.

How valid is this go-100,000-MW-or-go-home claim? According to Platts, the Rosatom guy used the CANDU as an example of what will happen to vendors of boiling water reactors, who may represent more serious competition for Russian PWRs than the CANDU. But he is also worried about the CANDU 6: it is competing directly against Russian and French PWR technology in Jordan, and possibly in Argentina.

Presumably GE-Hitachi (GEH), the biggest BWR maker, will read the writing on the Rosatom wall and just withdraw from the global reactor market. And Areva, which only 12 days ago signalled its readiness to offer its own BWR, the 1,200 MW Kerena, to New Brunswick, will also abandon that design and focus only on the 1,100 MW Atmea and the 1,650 MW EPR (both PWRs).
Such wishful thinking is commonplace when companies talk about their competitors. Rosatom obviously hopes that other prospective buyers are listening, and that this go-big-or-go-home idea takes root in buyers’ minds. If that happens, then the competitive field is narrowed down to the big PWR vendors Toshiba-Westinghouse, Areva, Rosatom, and the South Koreans. Against that field, Rosatom hopes that the Russian VVER, with safety features its proponents claim come close to being as inherent as those of BWRs, comes out on top.
Still, it is worth examining the CANDU situation, since the Canadian government is trying to sell the CANDU part of AECL. Why is nobody building one of these reactors right now? Does it really have anything to do with the size of the worldwide CANDU fleet? Let’s look at the most “firm” sale AECL has in the hopper right now: two, maybe three, ACRs to Ontario Power Generation. OPG wants 3,000 MW of new capacity at its Darlington station. That process has been on the shelf since this time last year, reportedly because of the high cost of AECL’s bid.
More at:
http://canadianenergyissues.com/2010/07/20/a-cold-blooded-look-at-the-candu-problems-and-opportunities/