They sold it to a consortium of Brookfield Renewable Partners and Cameco, a Canadian nuclear fuel and services company.
[5] On February 6, 2006 Toshiba confirmed it was buying Westinghouse Electric Company for $5.4bn and announced it would sell a minority stake to investors.
[8] Reasons in favor of a sale were: The commercial risk of the company's business in Asia may have been too high for a company then owned by taxpayers; if Westinghouse won the bid for any new nuclear stations in a UK competition, questions may be raised of favoritism, but if it lost, it might have been seen as a lack of faith in its own technology.
], that Toshiba was paying US$1.6 Bn for the Shaw-owned 20% stake, and that it was the 50% rise in the yen on its yen-denominated debt over five years, which had led it to exercise its sale option.
[13][14] After several years of doing business there, Westinghouse decided to move its world headquarters from the Energy Center in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, to Cranberry Woods in Cranberry Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania, as reported in a 2007 memo to its employees[15] that stated the main reason was the rapid expansion of the global nuclear industry.
As part of this move, Westinghouse piloted the first commuter shuttle running an all-day loop between Monroeville and Cranberry Township.
[24][25] The projects responsible for this loss were mostly the construction of four AP1000 reactors at Vogtle in Georgia and Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina.
[26][27] The Wall Street Journal reported that the four nuclear reactors being built in the southeastern U.S. would be left to an unknown fate.
[29] On September 24, 2017, the Post & Courier reported that Westinghouse had hired unlicensed workers to create mechanical and electrical blueprints for the V.C.
The delay due to the constantly changing, and consequently untested, design prompted Li Yulun, former vice-president of China National Nuclear Corporation, in 2013 to raise concerns over the safety standards of the plant.
[57] In May 2011 after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, US government regulators found problems with the design of the shield building of the new reactors.
Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 2005 said that computations submitted by Westinghouse about the building's design appeared to be wrong and "had led to more questions."
He said the company had not used a range of possible temperatures for calculating potential seismic stresses on the shield building in the event of an earthquake, for example.
"[59] In November 2011, the AP1000 Oversight Group published a report highlighting six areas of major concern and un-reviewed safety questions requiring immediate technical review by the NRC.
The report concluded that certification of the AP1000 should be delayed until the original and current "unanswered safety questions" raised by the AP1000 Oversight Group are resolved.
[61] In October 2013, US energy secretary Ernest Moniz announced that China was to supply components to the US nuclear power plants under construction as part of a bilateral co-operation agreement between the two countries.
In 2000 Westinghouse started development of fuel for customers in Finland and Hungary, supported by cheap Export–Import Bank of the United States loans, but the business remained small-scale in competition from cheaper Russian suppliers.
[68] In 2015, the European Union awarded $2 million in funding to a Westinghouse-led consortium to support the development of a more competitive fuel for the Russian built reactors.
[70][71] In October 2022, Westinghouse was selected to build Poland's first nuclear power plant based on three AP1000 reactors, with possibly a further three at a later date.
Combustion Engineering (now Westinghouse) entered into a ten-year technology transfer program with the Korean nuclear industry aiming at self-reliance, which was extended in 1997.
[75] Westinghouse has been involved in South Africa through support of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station since the 1990s, both reactors are Westinghouse-licensed.