Westinghouse Bankruptcy: Nuclear Power Stopped in Trilateral Countries

PRESS RELEASE

Westinghouse Bankruptcy: Nuclear Power Stopped in Trilateral Countries

March 29, 2017 (EIRNS)—Japan’s Toshiba Corporation announced yesterday that it is putting its Westinghouse subsidiary into bankruptcy, and will take a $4.3 billion loss in restated reports for a nine-month period. Westinghouse, which has built the P-1000 reactor, will now be taken out of the work on the only four reactors under construction in the United States—the V.C. Summer units in South Carolina and the Vogtle units in Georgia—making it possible that those reactors will not be finished. Since the March 2011 tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, costs of the constructing plants has ballooned so rapidly from additional "safety" regulations and inspections and the time they consume, that the two Summer units are estimated to cost $22 billion to construct; the two Vogtle units $19 billion. Economies of scale have become impossible in the "Trilateral" countries as Japan and most of the European Union have stopped allowing plants to operate or be built.

Toshiba says it will now limit Westinghouse to the nuclear plant servicing and fuel businesses alone.

But CEO Thomas Haeberle of URENCO, the second-largest nuclear fuel fabrication company in the world, announced that it is completely reorienting its business to Asia and the Middle East—Iran, Emirates, Egypt—and essentially abandoning operations in the United States and Europe.

"This change is of a permanent nature," Haeberle said. "The strong growth potential for nuclear power is in Asia and the Mideast."

Since 2013, URENCO has been the last remaining nuclear fuel supplier in the United States.

It has become a fact that nuclear power development is now an exclusively Eurasian project. Cheap and fundamentally unreliable gas/wind/solar development now rules in the United States; it is the only power development which can find financing, or refinancing in the case of extensions of nuclear plants.

But the change is not "of a permanent nature," with the BRICS and Belt and Road Initiatives for advanced infrastructure being offered to the United States. Not only is nuclear essential to U.S. recovery and productivity. Now a Hamiltonian national credit institution and cooperation with Russia and China have become the essential preconditions for nuclear—particularly nuclear desalination, which "renewable" types cannot do on a sustained basis.