Nuclear Reactions
I read a great article by Glenn Williams, entitled “U.S. Nuclear Reactors 101“. It was on RealMoney.com, a subscription site, and I’m not going to give you Williams’ investment advice – that’s what you pay your money for, guys. What interested me was how international the nuclear industry has become. Some of us may remember when General Electric and Westinghouse were the whole game for nuclear in the United States, but that is certainly no longer the case. And that’s important to recognize now that the pendulum of opinion is swinging back to nuclear after so many years in the desert.
Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, built with GE reactors a quarter century ago.
The United States paid a very high price for the decades that we effectively withdrew from the nuclear power game. Despite developing some of the best and safest nuclear power technology (I’m thinking U.S. Navy, not Three Mile Island here), other countries have developed nuclear technology in other directions since we took our sabbatical. The players in competitions for new U.S. nuclear plants include the Japanese, the French and even one Kazakh company. We haven’t seen the Chinese and the Russians yet. Let’s take a look at who is who.
There are two broad categories of nuclear power reactors: pressurized water reactors (PWR) and boiling water reactors (BWR). The PWR builders include Westinghouse, Unistar and Mitsubishi. Westinghouse certainly sounds like a U.S. company, and it once was, but today Westinghouse is owned by Toshiba (67%), The Shaw Group (20%), Kazatomprom (10%) and Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries (3%). That makes Westinghouse a Japanese-owned company with minority U.S. and Kazakh interests. UniStar is a joint venture between Constellation Energy (U.S.) and Electricité de France. And Mitsubishi, of course, is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of Japan’s biggest companies.
The only BWR reactors available for U.S. power projects are from a U.S.-Japan joint venture formed by General Electric and Hitachi, known as GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
Westinghouse would supply the reactors for fourteen projects in the United States currently awaiting approval. UniStar has three potential customers, so does GE Hitachi, and Mitsubishi has two. Those are just applications, however, so we are a long way from reviving what was once a thriving American industry. That means lost jobs, but not necessarily any loss in quality. Japan and France have remarkable safety records in their nuclear programs and we can benefit from that. But pity the poor Congressman who decides we need a Buy America rule for nuclear reactors. Betcha you one of them is going to try it.
