Westinghouse sale to Brookfield for US$4.6bn complete (US)

The sale of the bankrupt US nuclear technology company Westinghouse to the financial services firm Brookfield Business Partners has been completed as previously announced in January 2018. The transaction has become effective and enables Westinghouse to successfully emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection file submission, which was submitted in March 2017 by Westinghouse's former parent company Toshiba. Toshiba had been seeking a buyer for more than a year.

Westinghouse is in charge of all AP1000 nuclear projects worldwide, including four in the United States (two units at VC Summer in South Carolina and two at Vogtle, in Georgia), and four in China (two at Sanmen and two at Haiyang). Toshiba purchased Westinghouse in 2006 from British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), expecting a significant growth of the global nuclear power generation and a 130 GW growth of the global nuclear capacity between 2006 and 2020. However, only a fourth of this figure was achieved between 2006 and 2017 (+28 GW), which means that Westinghouse's growth potential was not that high.

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EDF delays Flamanville EPR project startup by another year (France)

The French utility EDF has completed in-depth examination of 148 out of the 150 welds in the main secondary system of the 1,650 MWe Flamanville-3 EPR reactor (France): 33 have quality deficiencies that have to be repaired, while 20 fail to meet high quality requirements and will be reworked. The schedule and the construction costs of the project have been revised accordingly. The loading of nuclear fuel is now scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2019 instead of the fourth quarter of 2018, while the construction costs will increase to €10.9bn from the €10.5bn expected previously (up from a December 2012 estimate of €8bn).

The project is facing other challenges and even though the French nuclear watchdog (ASN) cleared the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) of the unit, it will have to be replaced by 2024 at the latest. Even if the reactor comes onstream in 2019 as planed, a planned maintenance will have to be scheduled before this date to replace the RPV once a new one has been produced.

The Flamanville project was initially expected to be commissioned in 2012 at a cost of €3bn; it will now start at least 7 years behind schedule, posting a cost escalation of nearly €8bn. This delay will also postpone the planned closure of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant by one year.

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