Political connections in Holtec’s plans for boosting nuclear power in India

Holtec’s Singh plans to build $680 million factory to boost nuclear power in India, The Inquirer, by Joseph N. DiStefano, November 26, 2018 On a flower-decked table in Mumbai, India, last week, a Holtec International delegation led by Krishna P. Singh, the India native and triple-degree Penn grad, joined with a group headed by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, of Maharashtra, India’s second-most populous state, to sign a memo of understanding allowing Holtec to build a factory the company says will “give India autonomous capability” to make systems and parts for “the country’s planned expansion of nuclear generation.”……….

The company didn’t provide a proposed timetable or the cost of the plan. The Indian Express newspaper said Holtec “is keen to invest $680 million,” or 48 billion India rupees. “The objective is to build a facility on the lines of the capacity and capability of Holtec’s plant in the U.S.,” the Express added. Holtec has two newly-constructed factories on the Camden waterfront, and a former Westinghouse plant near Pittsburgh, among other U.S. facilities.

The agreement sounds “consistent with the US-India nuclear relationship in general,” said Michael Horowitz, political science professor at Penn. “The US-India civil nuclear agreement, signed in 2005, removed constraints on nuclear trade between the US and India” and encouraged people in both countries who hoped to build and supply nuclear power stations………
Singh said then that he hoped to install, in the Philadelphia area, “large capital equipment” to be used “for building nuclear plants in India to meet that nation’s exploding need for clean energy.” Singh is now prepared to go further, building heavy equipment in an India factory. ………

Singh, whose principal residence is in Hobe Sound, Fla., works with politicians in the United States as well as India. George Norcross, the insurance broker, Cooper Health chairman, and South Jersey Democratic leader, sits on Holtec’s board. And former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican who recently announced that she was stepping down as ambassador to the United Nations, was a special guest at the 2014 dedication of the Singh Nanotechnology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. At that event, Haley told me that her family and Singh’s were friends, both tracing their roots to Gujarat.

Singh, a former co-owner with Norcross of The Inquirer, had previously given $50,000 to the Movement Fund, a group backing Haley’s political campaigns. Other donors included Trump, who gave $5,000, and Foster Friess, a former Chadds Ford resident and founder of the Brandywine growth-stock mutual funds, who gave $250,000. Friess was defeated in the Republican primary for governor of his adopted state of Wyoming in August.

Holtec has in the past gotten so close to government that the company got hurt. In 2010 the U.S. government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority assessed Holtec a $2 million “administrative fee” after a TVA employee pleaded guilty to failing to report $54,000 that he had collected from a Holtec subsidiary at the company’s direction, the industry publication Platt’s Nuclear Fuel reported at the time.

TVA also temporarily barred Holtec from competing for federal contracts, the first time the agency did that to a contractor since its founding in the 1930s. But two years later the authority awarded Holtec a 10-year, $298 million contract to continue supplying the agency with uranium-fuel casks, after the company agreed to implement a new ethics program. November 26, 2018 Joseph N. DiStefano | @PhillyJoeD | JoeD@phillynews.com http://www2.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq-phillydeals/holtec-krishna-singh-nuclear-camden-maharashtraa-20181126.html

December 1, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | India, politics international

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