The Ontario government put its nuclear power plans on hold last month because the bid from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the only “compliant” one received, was more than three times higher than what the province expected to pay, the Star has learned.The vaunted French were similarly exhorbitant:
Sources close to the bidding, one involved directly in one of the bids, said that adding two next-generation Candu reactors at Darlington generating station would have cost around $26 billion.
The bid from France’s Areva NP also blew past expectations, sources said. Areva’s bid came in at $23.6 billion, with two 1,600-megawatt reactors costing $7.8 billion and the rest of the plant costing $15.8 billion. It works out to $7,375 per kilowatt, and was based on a similar cost estimate Areva had submitted for a plant proposed in Maryland...The Areva bid was ultimately deemed "non-compliant", perhaps because (according to Tyler Hamilton) because they insisted the government bear part of the cost escalation risk.
I guess this means we may really need the next generation of nuclear technology before any sort of nuclear revolution gets underway.
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