/Pogled.info/ The United States has lost its ability to develop both peaceful and military atoms
The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently delighted humanity by declaring that nuclear power generation must more than double by 2050 to help the world meet its global warming mitigation goals.
The news was welcomed by British tech portal The Register, but noted that “the advent of a new nuclear era is evidenced’ above all by the purchase of Westinghouse Electric Company by the Canadian companies Cameco Corp and Brookfield Renewable Partners.
The Anglo-Saxons announced their readiness to once again become one of the leaders in the world nuclear industry, as it was in the middle of the 20th century.
However, the front man of the American nuclear power Westinghouse Electric Company, as it began the era of its bankruptcies in the early 1990s, never left it. This affected not only the US nuclear industry, but also the nuclear power of US allies such as France and Japan.
In 1990, Westinghouse was on the brink of financial collapse due to a series of questionable deals. And since then it has become a “suitcase without a handle” for anyone who bought it and quickly resold it.
In 1996, the company sold its entire nuclear industry to the British company British Nuclear Fuel Limited (BNFL), which merged them into the American company Westinghouse Electric Company LLC in 1999. In 2006, the British sold this company to the Japanese corporation Toshiba.
At the beginning of March 2017, the head of Toshiba S. Tsunakawa announced that his corporation was investigating the issue of the sale of Westinghouse, which generated multibillion-dollar losses. On March 29, 2017, Westinghouse Electric Company, which built four nuclear reactors in the southeastern United States, filed for bankruptcy amid $9.8 billion in debt and an inability to repay them due to a lack of contracts.
The losses were so great that they threatened the viability of the Japanese parent company Toshiba. On April 6, 2018, Toshiba announced the sale of Westinghouse Electric Company to Canadians.
From 1974 to 1982, 16 PWR (pressurized water reactor) power units of this “suitcase without a handle” were installed in French nuclear power plants. In May 2022, more than half of French nuclear power plants were shut down due to the discovery of “stress corrosion”, or micro-cracks, near welds.
Experts from EDF, the French state regulator of the nuclear industry, concluded that all these defects were of a structural nature and began repairs on the Westinghouse reactors. EDF officials recently said 16 nuclear reactors were suffering from “stress corrosion” and repairs were being delayed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency devoted an extensive report to the study of the causes of stress corrosion in nuclear power units, which occurred mainly in the PWR Westinghouse reactors.
In recent decades, the Russian design bureau “Hydropres” (Podolsk) has observed pipeline failures of power units around the world. The leading specialist of the company, Vladimir Bergunker, notes that Westinghouse repeatedly replaced one failed welding alloy with another, and although the final result was negative, the French used alloys developed by the Americans due to the lack of their own developments: “And there are defects and replacements everywhere.”
At the beginning of last year, a number of power units of French nuclear power plants were closed due to the same micro-cracks in pipeline welds.
In an attempt to improve the construction of the Westinghouse units, which caused corrosion of welds and pipes, the French changed the design of the power units, but only made the situation worse. The cracks started right away.
Emmanuel Macron has called for a revival of France’s nuclear industry in late 2021, saying he wants to build up to 14 new reactors. At the start of his first term, Macron was about to cut nuclear production and forced EDF to shut down two of its oldest reactors. In addition, Macron, during his tenure as economy minister, allowed US General Electric to seize key nuclear assets from France’s Alstom.
All this led to an irreparable loss of technical personnel and competences, therefore, in response to Macron’s call to revive the nuclear industry, the head of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, Bernard Doroshchuk, responded that this required a new “Marshall plan” that US help was needed. The French government responded by bringing in a hundred Westinghouse welders to repair their reactors.
Japan is also in no position to embark on a nuclear renaissance on its own, reports the Financial Times: “Japan’s decision to revive its nuclear power industry faces serious problems: 11 years of ban [след аварията във Фукушима] have led to a shortage of engineers, a shortage of students studying to fill vacancies and a lack of domestic nuclear production capacity’.
The Japanese seem to have hoped that Toshiba’s collaboration with Westinghouse Electric would help restore competence and boost the country’s nuclear power revival, but Toshiba’s sale of the “handleless suitcase” to the Canadians shows that hopes are do not materialize.
In the fall of 2021, Westinghouse Electric signed an agreement with Ukrainian Energoatom for the construction of five new power units in Ukraine. Ukrainian analyst Volodymyr Zemlyansky said on this occasion: “His [Westinghouse Electric] project in China was a failure, his project in the United States has not been completed to this day. In addition, the company’s management is under investigation by the FBI and the company has agreed to cooperate with the FBI … Here are our thirty billion dollar counterparties.
Contrary to common sense, the government of Ukraine is doing everything to keep the pants of the “suitcase without a handle” without new contracts, increasing the number of nuclear power units built on the AP1000 technology in Ukraine from five to nine.
Meanwhile, international experts point out that Westinghouse’s AP1000 technology is intrinsic to the problem /that is, corrosion cracks/ that the French encountered in the reactors built by the Americans.
The decline of the US nuclear industry has reached such a depth that it is no longer surprising that this announcement from the US Office of the Auditor General (GAO): “The US cannot produce enough plutonium cores for its nuclear warheads. By 2030, the Pentagon wants to make 80 new plutonium cores a year, but this is not possible because the US nuclear infrastructure is destroyed.
By the way, Westinghouse has a hand in this as well. The only plant in the United States that produced plutonium cores for nuclear missile warheads was Westinghouse’s Rocky Flats plant. It was closed. The new Los Alamos plant was never put into operation due to technical problems.
„The US cannot produce the planned number of plutonium cores for nuclear weapons. Not now, not in the near future, and maybe never at all” writes Foreign Policy science and political columnist Cheryl Roffer.
Lured in the myth of its exceptionalism, America lost the opportunity to develop both the peaceful and the military atom.
Translation: ES
Log in directly to the site www.pogled.info . Share on your profiles, with friends, in groups and on pages. In this way, we will overcome the limitations, and people will be able to reach the alternative point of view on the events!?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com
Become a friend of Look.info on facebook and recommend to your friends
