Potential purchaser for AECL

Friday, 19 January 2007 The head of industrial group SNC-Lavalin has publicly expressed his company's interest in purchasing Canada's state nuclear company AECL.

"We strongly believe nuclear will become the preferred option for base-load power generation in seven or eight years and we're interested in AECL, on our own or with partners," said Jacques Lamarre. His remarks were reported by the CanWest news service.

State-owned AECL, which sells and maintains indigenously designed Candu pressurised heavy water reactors has been seen as a likely prospect for privatisation for several months.

The outlook for the firm is fairly good: Canada's most populous province, Ontario, is facing a shortfall in electricity generation that will reach 24,000 MWe by 2025. Addressing that is an C$83 billion ($71 billion) project lasting 20 years that will leave the province with about 14,000 MWe of nuclear generation - virtually all of that from new nuclear plants with the remainder from the refurbishment of existing ones at around the 30-year point in their lives, and from the re-connection of previously mothballed nuclear units.

AECL would like to build the first examples of its Advanced Candu design, but is also offering an enhanced version of the established Candu 6.

However, the days when AECL would be guaranteed nuclear contracts at home are gone. Provincial leaders and planners want to select designs and contractors on a competitive basis and there have been rumours that AECL could be privatised. It has been widely noted that AECL's market value as a private company would very much depend on the confidence the Canadian market has in it and its new technology.

Lamarre said that the conditions of a privatisation would "depend on what AECL's owner [the government of Canada] really wants, But we should be making much more intensive efforts to market Candu reactors worldwide."

Candu reactors are under construction in Romania and AECL recently signed an agreement with Nucleoeléctrica of Argentina to refurbish the Embalse reactor and conduct a feasibility study for the construction of another.

SNC-Lavalin has previously worked with AECL to construct the four Candu reactors at Wolsong, South Korea, the two units at Quinshan in China, Cernavoda 1 and 2 in Romania and Embalse.

Further information

AECL
Nucleoeléctrica
SNC-Lavalin

WNA's Canada's Uranium Products and Nuclear Power information paper