Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/18/2014
Westinghouse Electric Company and Canadian Nuclear Partners, a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation, announced an agreement this week that enables the two companies to work more closely together on global nuclear projects. The agreement includes potential joint projects in refurbishment, maintenance and outage services, decommissioning and remediation of existing nuclear facilities, and new nuclear power plants. “This is a great example of two highly respected companies bringing their complementary strengths and capabilities together for the common good of the global nuclear energy industry,” said Westinghouse President and CEO Danny Roderick. “This relationship will further add to Westinghouse’s advanced products and services that support our global customers’ efforts to improve operating efficiencies and achieve cost-effective energy security and diversity while not damaging the environment with greenhouse-gas-emitting sources.”
For Canadian Nuclear Partners, which operates outside of OPG, the partnership offers it access to international commercial markets that were not there before. Canadian Nuclear Partners President Pierre Tremblay told RW Monitor this week that this opportunity will help commercialize the decommissioning/remediation capabilities that OPG has honed over the years. “Being operators, we have focused on our selves, developing tools and techniques,” Tremblay said. “Because we are the big operator in the province of Ontario, we developed a lot of these capabilities. We just have never gone out and commercialized them. Over the years, we have probably haven’t gotten the best value for the ingenuity and capabilities of our organization. The relationship with Westinghouse allows us to get better value for the province of Ontario and for our company.” Tremblay added that Westinghouse brings its international expertise to the partnership. “What we wanted was an access to international markets and to work with a company that is very competent in converting ideas into commercial products,” he said. “They offer unparalleled access to global markets. They are everywhere, where we have not been out there.”
Chalk River a ‘Possibility Down the Road’
Tremblay indicated that the two companies have already begun to work together to start bidding on a range of contracts; however, the agreement does not involve the procurement underway for a contractor to operate Atomic Energy of Canada Limited sites, including the Chalk River laboratories. OPG is believed to be part of a team led by URS competing for the procurement. “We are not partnered with Westinghouse in this manner,” Tremblay said. “That was certainly not the impetus for getting together. Is there a possibility down the road for us to look at something specific? Sure, absolutely.”
Tremblay added that the Chalk River site holds a lot of interest for both OPG and Canadian Nuclear Partners. “Obviously, from a number of perspectives, OPG and Canadian Nuclear Partners are interested in what is going at Chalk River,” he said. “The Chalk River site is a site where they do a lot of the life cycle management for the CANDU reactors, and not only the CANDU reactor, which is a neutron source, but the hot cells as well are important to us to maintain an access to them so we can continue to do the research to demonstrate the servers for our reactors. From the Canadian Nuclear Partners side of the equation, we are an operator, and certainly we feel like we can help and assist as the site moves forward.”
