The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has approved the Chapter 11 reorganization plan for Westinghouse Electric, which said the authorization paves the way for its sale to a Canadian asset management company.
The reorganization plan was overwhelmingly supported by Westinghouse’s creditors, the company said in a Tuesday news release.
Brookfield Business Partners in January announced it would buy the nuclear technology company from Toshiba for $4.6 billion. The sale should be completed in the third quarter of 2018, subject to the usual regulatory and financial approvals.
Westinghouse Government Services, a limited liability corporation competing for nuclear cleanup contracts from the U.S. Energy Department Office of Environmental Management, would become part of Brookfield.
“All parts of the company (including Government Services) continue to operate in the normal course in the meantime,” Westinghouse spokeswoman Sarah Cassella said by email Friday.
Westinghouse Government Services is a partner in Mid-America Conversion Services, DOE’s depleted uranium hexafluoride contractor at its Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, remediation projects.
At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a Westinghouse-Fluor partnership was a runner-up for a 10-year, $4.7 billion liquid waste management contract DOE awarded in October to a BWX Technologies-led group.
Energy Department records also show Westinghouse Government Services was among the many prospective contractors that attended a January industry procurement briefing on the planned Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The agency last week issued the request for proposals for the construction contract.
Westinghouse also remains involved in several facets of the nuclear back-end industry. A company website lists decommissioning studies, spent fuel services, site and waste characterization plans, waste packaging, and final site surveys and monitoring as among its nuclear business lines.
The company said earlier this month it had finished a major decommissioning project at the former Barsebäck nuclear power plant in Skåne, Sweden. Barsebäck 2 stopped operating in 2005 and decommissioning began in August 2016. Westinghouse’s role included the underwater segmentation and packaging of the reactor vessel internals, along with engineering studies and equipment manufacturing.
Westinghouse, which had hoped to see its AP 1000 reactor design installed at many new nuclear plants internationally, was hard hit by the eroding market for new nuclear power in North America.
The company’s financial woes were worsened by the company’s role as engineering, procurement, and construction contractor for two now-canceled power reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina, analysts have said. The cancellation happened not long after Westinghouse had become prime contractor for the planned South Carolina nuclear units.
“Confirmation of our plan of reorganization is one of the final steps in the completion of our strategic restructuring” said Westinghouse President and CEO José Emeterio Gutiérrez in a press release. “We are on track to fulfil our promise to emerge from this strategic restructuring process as a stronger business partner while retaining our primary focus on safety.”
