Westinghouse: Origins and Effects of the Downfall of a Nuclear Giant - World Nuclear Industry Status Report
▻https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Westinghouse-Origins-and-Effects-of-the-Downfall-of-a-Nuclear-Gi
what led to this bankruptcy were two bets that Westinghouse and Toshiba made. The first bet was that there will be a growing and large market for nuclear power plants. When Toshiba acquired Westinghouse from British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL) in February 2006, the press release confidently projected: “By 2020, the global market for nuclear power generation is expected to grow by 50 percent compared with today”. At that time, the President and CEO of Toshiba estimated that there would be 10 large (1 GW) nuclear reactors built each year till 2020 amounting to 130 GW of new reactor capacity. That estimate was off by at least an order of magnitude. Much of the hype around that time was over what many saw as a coming #nuclear_renaissance
(...) In 2013, for example, a former Vice-President of CNNC and Vice-Minister of Atomic Energy complained to South China Morning Post: “Our state leaders have put a high priority on [nuclear safety] but companies executing projects do not seem to have the same level of understanding”.