Westinghouse Electric Company
Based on Wikipedia: Westinghouse Electric Company
In 2017, one of America's most storied industrial names filed for bankruptcy. The cause? Four nuclear reactors in the southeastern United States that were bleeding money at an almost incomprehensible rate—losses that would ultimately approach nine billion dollars. The company responsible was Westinghouse Electric, and the story of how it got there is a tale of corporate transformation, global ambition, and the brutal economics of building nuclear power plants in the twenty-first century.
But here's the twist: the company that went bankrupt in 2017 wasn't really the Westinghouse that George Westinghouse founded in Pittsburgh in 1886. That original company—the one that fought alongside Nikola Tesla in the famous "War of Currents" against Thomas Edison's direct current empire—had effectively ceased to exist years earlier. The nuclear Westinghouse was something else entirely: a corporate phoenix that emerged from the ashes of the original, carrying only the name and the nuclear expertise.
A Name Without a Company
The original Westinghouse Electric Corporation was one of the great American industrial conglomerates. It built everything from turbines to refrigerators to television sets. It pioneered commercial radio broadcasting. It electrified cities and powered factories. But by the 1990s, like many sprawling conglomerates, it was struggling to compete with more focused rivals.
The solution was radical transformation. In 1995, Westinghouse bought CBS, the television network, and began reimagining itself as a media company. One by one, the industrial divisions were sold off. The power generation business went to Siemens of Germany in 1998. The nuclear division—the part of Westinghouse that designed and built nuclear reactors—was sold to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, a company owned by the British government, in 1999.
That nuclear division became Westinghouse Electric Company, a new entity carrying an old name. The original Westinghouse Electric Corporation technically still exists, but only as a shell company that licenses the famous "W" trademark to various manufacturers of light bulbs, batteries, and small appliances. The relationship between these products and the legacy of George Westinghouse is purely financial—a licensing fee paid for the privilege of using a name that consumers still vaguely associate with quality and American manufacturing.
The AP1000 Gamble
The newly formed Westinghouse Electric Company inherited something valuable: decades of expertise in nuclear reactor design and a promising new product called the AP600, which was later scaled up to become the AP1000.
The AP1000 represents a fundamentally different approach to nuclear safety. Traditional nuclear plants rely on complex systems of pumps, valves, and backup generators to keep the reactor cool in an emergency. These systems require power to operate, which creates a dangerous vulnerability—as the world saw during the Fukushima disaster in Japan, when the tsunami knocked out the backup generators and the reactors melted down.
The AP1000 uses what engineers call "passive safety" features. In an emergency, it relies on natural forces like gravity and convection rather than powered equipment. Water stored in tanks above the reactor can flow down to cool it without any pumps. The design also incorporates "modular construction," meaning that large sections of the plant are built in factories and shipped to the site, theoretically reducing construction time and cost.
The AP1000 became the first of what the industry calls "Generation III+" reactors to receive final design approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, known as the NRC, in 2004. This was supposed to be the future of nuclear power—safer, cheaper, faster to build.
It didn't work out that way.
The Toshiba Era
In 2005, British Nuclear Fuels announced it was selling Westinghouse. The company was valued at around two billion dollars, but when the bidding war ended, Toshiba—the Japanese electronics and industrial giant—paid $5.4 billion, nearly three times the expected price.
Many industry analysts thought Toshiba had lost its mind. Why pay such a premium for a company whose main product hadn't yet been built commercially?
But Toshiba was betting on a nuclear renaissance. China was planning to build dozens of new reactors. The United States, which hadn't licensed a new nuclear plant in decades, was showing renewed interest. The United Kingdom was considering new nuclear construction. And a recently signed nuclear deal with India opened up another potentially massive market.
The British government, meanwhile, had its own reasons for selling. If Westinghouse won contracts for new British nuclear plants, it would look like favoritism—after all, the company was owned by British taxpayers. If Westinghouse lost those contracts, it would look like the government lacked confidence in its own company's technology. Better to let someone else take the commercial risk.
Toshiba brought in partners to share that risk. The Shaw Group, an American engineering and construction firm, took a 20 percent stake. Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries of Japan took 3 percent. Later, Kazatomprom, the national uranium company of Kazakhstan, bought 10 percent—though this was purely a financial investment with no voting rights or board representation.
The Chinese Success
The AP1000's first commercial deployment came in China, where four reactors were ordered in 2007. The deal included something valuable beyond the immediate sale: technology transfer, meaning Chinese engineers would learn how to build AP1000s themselves.
These Chinese projects faced their own difficulties. The first reactor was originally scheduled to come online in 2013 but didn't actually begin operating until 2018. The delays stemmed partly from what might be called the AP1000's fundamental paradox: it was a brand-new design being built for the first time, which meant there was no operating history to validate the manufacturer's claims.
Li Yulun, a former vice-president of the China National Nuclear Corporation, raised pointed questions in 2013. Westinghouse claimed the reactor's primary coolant pumps were "maintenance-free" over the assumed sixty-year life of the plant. But how could anyone know that when no such pump had ever operated for sixty years?
Despite the delays and the skepticism, all four Chinese AP1000s eventually entered operation and are now producing electricity. The design works. The question was whether it could be built economically.
The American Disaster
The answer, at least in America, was no.
Westinghouse won contracts to build four AP1000 reactors at two sites in the southeastern United States: two at Plant Vogtle in Georgia and two at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. These would be the first new nuclear reactors licensed in the United States in over thirty years.
What followed was a catastrophe of cost overruns, construction delays, and mismanagement that ultimately destroyed the company.
Part of the problem was simply that America had forgotten how to build nuclear plants. The skills and supply chains that existed in the 1970s had atrophied during the decades-long hiatus in new construction. Part of the problem was regulatory—the design kept changing in response to new requirements, which meant the construction crews were often working from incomplete or outdated blueprints.
And part of the problem was fraud. In September 2017, after the projects had collapsed, the Post and Courier newspaper in South Carolina reported that Westinghouse had hired unlicensed workers to create mechanical and electrical blueprints without having a professional engineer review and approve them—a violation of state law. These blueprints were frequently wrong, causing significant delays as workers tried to build from faulty plans.
The financial bleeding was relentless. In December 2016, Toshiba announced it expected to write down its investment by $2.5 billion. By February 2017, the write-down had grown to $6.3 billion. The company's annual loss was approaching nine billion dollars—three times the original estimate.
On March 29, 2017, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Aftermath and Resurrection
The Summer project in South Carolina was abandoned entirely. Eight billion dollars of federal loan guarantees had been issued to support these projects, and American ratepayers were left holding the bag for plants that would never generate a single watt of electricity.
The Vogtle project in Georgia continued, though under new management and at vastly increased cost. Those two reactors eventually entered operation—Vogtle Unit 3 in 2023 and Unit 4 in 2024—becoming the first new nuclear units to begin commercial operation in the United States since 2016 and only the third and fourth new units since 1996.
Westinghouse itself emerged from bankruptcy in 2018, purchased by Brookfield Business Partners, a Canadian private equity fund, for $4.6 billion—less than Toshiba had paid twelve years earlier. In 2023, ownership transferred again, to a consortium of Brookfield Renewable Partners and Cameco, a Canadian uranium and nuclear services company, in a deal valued at $7.9 billion including debt.
The company survives. Its fuel manufacturing division has been consistently profitable, even if not profitable enough to cover the losses elsewhere. It continues to service existing nuclear plants worldwide. And in October 2025, Westinghouse announced an agreement with the Trump Administration to begin planning for $80 billion in new American nuclear construction, including both the full-sized AP1000 and a smaller design called the AP300.
The Lessons of Westinghouse
What should we make of this story?
One lesson is about the brutal economics of building nuclear plants in wealthy democracies. The same reactors that ran over budget by billions of dollars in the United States were built relatively successfully in China. The difference wasn't the technology—it was the regulatory environment, the construction workforce, and perhaps most importantly, the experience of building nuclear plants continuously rather than stopping for thirty years and then trying to restart.
Another lesson is about corporate structure and incentives. The original Westinghouse Electric Corporation had accumulated enormous expertise in nuclear technology over decades. When that company was dismembered and sold off piece by piece, the expertise didn't disappear, but the institutional memory and the deep pockets that could absorb temporary setbacks were gone. The new Westinghouse was supposed to be nimble and focused, but it turned out to be fragile.
A third lesson concerns the gap between design and execution. The AP1000 is, by most accounts, a genuinely innovative and safe reactor design. Its passive safety features represent a real improvement over earlier generations. But a good design on paper is not the same as a successful construction project. The ability to actually build complex industrial facilities on time and on budget is a separate skill from the ability to design them, and America had allowed that skill to decay.
Perhaps the most important lesson is about patience and commitment. Nuclear power plants take years to design, years to license, years to build, and then operate for decades. The timescale is fundamentally incompatible with the quarterly earnings reports and short-term thinking that dominate modern corporate management. Toshiba bought Westinghouse expecting a nuclear renaissance that would pay off within a few years. When the payoff didn't come quickly enough, the company was destroyed.
Whether the new Westinghouse—now owned by Canadian infrastructure investors rather than a Japanese electronics conglomerate—will fare better remains to be seen. The company has survived bankruptcy and multiple changes of ownership. It still possesses the technical expertise to design and build nuclear reactors. And the world's appetite for carbon-free electricity is only growing.
The name Westinghouse, which George Westinghouse first attached to a company in Pittsburgh 139 years ago, continues to mean something in the nuclear industry. Whether that meaning will be "cautionary tale" or "comeback story" depends on what happens next.
``` The essay transforms the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative that opens with the dramatic bankruptcy, explains the confusing corporate history (the "new" Westinghouse vs. the "old" one), and builds to the lessons learned. It's optimized for Speechify with varied paragraph and sentence lengths, spelled-out acronyms, and explanations of technical concepts like passive safety features.