nuclear-news

The two big-name companies that won’t be designing Ontario’s next nuclear reactor The province has passed over two major players on its shortlist for a small-modular-reactor design. Will that mean a more competitive process? TVO

The three lucky companies are Terrestrial Energy (covered previously on TVO.org), GE Hitachi (with generations of nuclear experience in the United States), and X-energy. At least as notable, however, are two major omissions: NuScale and SNC-Lavalin, which makes the CANDU reactors that Ontario has relied on for decades………..

The problem for NuScale is that its design is meant to be packaged in clusters of up to 12, which is fine if you need 12 — but, right now, Ontario is looking to find one reactor that it could build reasonably quickly, to prove the design works and can be built economically, and then to reproduce it in other provinces, such as Saskatchewan………

In June of this year, however, SNC-Lavalin announced it was submitting a reactor design to the Canadian regulator in the 300-megawatt range — putting it on the larger end of the spectrum for something that’s still supposed to be “small” but is still smaller than traditional CANDU designs. Terrestrial Energy, by comparison, is offering a 195-megawatt design. Canada’s nuclear industry tried to market a 300-megawatt CANDU reactor in the 1980s (the CANDU 3) but never found a buyer. ………

handing the prize to SNC-Lavalin out of nostalgia for the CANDU design would have been a poor guarantee of value for electricity customers. https://www.tvo.org/article/the-two-big-name-companies-that-wont-be-designing-ontarios-next-nuclear-reactor