Gordon Edwards

Thinking outside the nuclear box

Oct 212012

Expensive, unreliable nuclear power has priced itself off the market.

Increasingly, nuclear power appears be a future technology whose time is past.

This was already evident as far back as 1978 — the last year that a CANDU nuclear plant was ordered in North America. In that year the Ontario Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning — in its Report on Nuclear Power in Ontario entitled A Race Against Time — summed up two years of hearings by saying: “Far from offering energy self-sufficiency, nuclear power at best offers uncertainty.” And so it has proved to be.

There goes CANDU

May 222012

Features

SNC Lavalin scandal compromises CANDU support, nuclear security.

by Gordon Edwards

SNC-Lavalin, the company that bought the CANDU division of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) for a mere $15 million last fall, is now rocked with scandal — and accused by its own nuclear engineers of "destroying" the CANDU industry by its unsupportive policies.

Already hundreds of the best-qualified professionals in the CANDU field have fled the company, seriously compromising its capability to design and build new reactors, as well as undermining the competence needed to service and refurbish old reactors.

Yesterday (May 9) we learned that SNC-Lavalin is being sued (in a class action suit by investors) for $1.5 billion in losses, due to plummeting stock prices triggered by improper activities on the part of the company's directors.