Westinghouse Electric Company
Westinghouse Electric Company
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Westinghouse Electric Company

Westinghouse Electric Company LLC is an American nuclear power company formed in 1999 from the nuclear power division of the original Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It offers nuclear products and services to utilities internationally, including nuclear fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation, control and design of nuclear power plants. Westinghouse's world headquarters are located in the Pittsburgh suburb of Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania.

The company's main product is the AP1000, a modern pressurized water reactor (PWR) design with many passive safety features and modular construction intended to lower construction time and cost. Twelve AP1000 reactors are currently in operation with a further nineteen in various stages of planning.

The company was initially formed as CBS Corporation spun off the remaining pieces of Westinghouse's industrial concerns, as part of Westinghouse's re-creation as a media company. Portions of their nuclear business were initially purchased by Siemens in 1998 before the remaining parts were purchased by British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) in 1999 and formed up as Westinghouse Electric. In 2005, BNFL sold the company to Toshiba.

The company went bankrupt in 2017 primarily due to ongoing cost overruns at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant and Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station expansions, the first US builds of the company's AP1000 design. It emerged from bankruptcy after being purchased by Brookfield Business Partners, a Canadian private equity fund. They sold it to a consortium of Brookfield Renewable Partners and Cameco, a Canadian nuclear fuel and services company. Renewable Partners is the current majority owner of Westinghouse.

Westinghouse Electric Company was formed in 1999, after the original company with that name, George Westinghouse's Westinghouse Electric, founded in 1886, ceased to exist due to a series of divestitures and mergers through the mid-to-late 1990s. These included Westinghouse Electric's purchase of CBS in 1995, expansion into communications and broadcasting, and the selling off of most non-broadcast operations by 1998, renaming itself CBS Corporation.

In 1998, the Westinghouse Power Generation Business unit was sold to Siemens of Germany. In 1999, CBS Corporation sold its nuclear business (Westinghouse Electric Company) to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) and a year later CBS Corporation was merged into Viacom (1971–2005), putting an end to the original Westinghouse. Legally, Westinghouse Electric Corporation still exists, mainly for the purpose of licensing, as a subsidiary of CBS Corporation.

In July 2005, BNFL confirmed it planned to sell Westinghouse, then estimated to be worth $2 billion. This attracted interest from several companies, including Toshiba, General Electric and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. When the Financial Times reported on January 23, 2006 that Toshiba had won the bid, it valued the company's offer at $5bn (£2.8bn). 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.

The sale surprised many industry experts who questioned the wisdom of BNFL selling one of the world's largest producers of nuclear reactors shortly before the market for nuclear power was expected to grow substantially; China, the United States and the United Kingdom were all expected to invest heavily in nuclear power. After the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal, there was also hope that India's plan of massive investment in nuclear plants would help to revive the U.S. nuclear power industry.

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