North American Developers Looking to Build 55,000 Megawatts of New Nuclear Power Generation by 2020

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). North America currently has 123 operating nuclear units that have a potential capacity of over 117,000 megawatts. The United States has 103 of those units, Canada has eighteen and Mexico has two. The nuclear power industry has proposed a 46.9% increase in generation, including more than 51,000 megawatts in the United States, 2,850 megawatts in Canada, and 2,000 megawatts to be developed in Mexico.

Click on the image at right to view a chart showing the breakdown of nuclear unit additions by market region.

Mexico’s government-owned Comision Federal de Electricidad currently has one nuclear power station (Laguna Verde) (Actopan, Mexico) that has two units producing a total of about 1,350 megawatts. The existing units are GE Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) and the new units that are being considered will utilize the same type of technology. The new 1,000-megawatt (MW) units are expected to come online in 2015 and 2017. Mexico is also studying the possibility of up to six more nuclear units through 2025.

Canada currently has eighteen nuclear units generating over 13,100 megawatts in three provinces. There are currently studies to add additional nuclear generation at existing nuclear plants: Bruce Nuclear Power (Tiverton, Ontario), Darlington Nuclear Power (Bowmanville, Ontario), the Point Lepreau Nuclear Station in New Brunswick, and possibly a grassroot location near Fort Mc Murray, Alberta to supply energy for oil sands recovery projects for an additional 2,850 megawatts an increase of 27.8% of nuclear power generation. Most of the new nuclear generation would utilize Atomic Energy Canada, Limited (AECL) (Ottawa, Ontario) CANDU 6 or CANDU 7 reactors.

In the United States, power generation project developers have announced seventeen new nuclear reactors at ten grassroot locations for a total of over 21,000 megawatts. This group includes developers that are small and relatively new to the nuclear industry. In addition to the grassroot projects, at eighteen existing nuclear power stations, 26 new units have been proposed for over 29,000 megawatts. This big jump in nuclear power project development is being assisted by the Department of Energy, which has shortened the licensing time frame to help meet the growth of “clean” nuclear energy to replace the “dirtier” fossil fuel generation. Most of the players in nuclear generation and their engineering and equipment support vendors joined consortiums to help develop some possible new nuclear units. At this point, the different constituents also started looking at not only working within their groups, but also on their own. A point of interest is that most of the new nuclear power generation is being proposed for the southern United States with the heaviest concentration being in Texas with twelve units for about 13,000 megawatts, or 25.9% of the United States total nuclear proposed generation.

Nuclear reactors currently being evaluated for use in the United States consists primarily of the General Electric Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR15) (~1550MW), Westinghouse Advanced Passive 1000 (AP 1000) pressurized water reactors (PWR), Unistar PWR (~1600MW) and the Toshiba Super-Safe Small Simple Sodium Reactor (932F 4S) (~10MW).

For more information on future business trends and project spending in the Power Industry, check out Industrial Info’s 2007 Power Industry Forecast.

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