May 28, 2008 9:44 pm US/Eastern
Westinghouse: Nuclear Energy In Renaissance
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
Forget those multi-billion dollar American oil companies and the OPEC oil cartel driving up energy costs.
Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse says nuclear energy is experiencing a renaissance and more nuclear power plants in the US could reduce oil prices.
"The more load that you take off fossil fuels, the less of a pressure you're going to have on prices, and that's going to have a beneficial effect on the pricing of oil," Westinghouse CEO Dr. Aris Candris said.
Candris says the switch to nuclear energy is also good news for Pittsburgh.
"Right now, about thirty units have been announced by utilities in the U.S. Roughly half of those, by the way, are Westinghouse units," Candris said.
Westinghouse officials say a nuclear renaissance means more jobs for Western Pennsylvania. Already they've hired 3,000 people in the last five years, and if the renaissance really kicks off, that means 500 jobs a year into the foreseeable future.
"We basically do the design of the plants here and we project manage these huge projects -- these are multi-billion dollar, multi-projects -- they are project managed out of here," Candris said. "So all the core resources that are responsible for the engineering and construction of these plants are done out of Pittsburgh."
That includes four plants in China. So would there be safety issues if an earthquake struck a nuclear plant?
"No, and the reason I answer it with a flat no is the following," Candris explained. "We design our plants for local conditions. For example, Japan, which is extremely earthquake prone, as I'm sure you know, has a large number of nuclear units. They are designed specifically to withstand earthquakes."
Westinghouse is now owned by the Japanese company Toshiba, so making earthquake-proof reactors is high priority.
Whatever the safety issues of the past, the latest design of nuclear plants, along with the desire to end dependence on oil, now has a majority of Americans opting for nuclear power as a source of energy.
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