Talk:ZEEP

NPOV
Having read the Candu reactor article I cannot see what justifies "highly successful" as a characterization of Candu. This could not even be said of Ontario Hydro projects - unless success is a government buying into a government project. Not a single Candu was ever built in UK or Germany or USA. The two references offered for that statement are Canadian. Is a non-Canadian editor available? (As a Canadian I can say that we are very slow to acknowledge our own bias or our own failings as a nation, no matter what jokes are made about our constantly apologizing for ourselves or down-playing our objectives.)

What is the international business community's assessment of the success of the Candu program as engineering for affordable electrical power? What was the level of transparency and what were the standards of governance in Candu deals such as that with Romania?

"Highly successful" just does not come to mind - and I am not even an opponent of nuclear power. What could a German editor make of this article if proposing to translate it given the German assessment of this technology and this power source? A Romanian editor in post-dictator Romania?

The Boeing 737 counts as "highly successful". Canada produced the first jet passenger transport and it was not - but it was followed by much government cash into aviation for decades. Some Soviet-era passenger aircraft may have been officially "highly-successful", but not all operators of those aircraft are as enthusiastic. I remember when Swiss Air was a "highly successful" airline operator, not to mention Pan Am. But even if they were such at one point in their day, CANDU is not a thing of the past, at least not in Ontario, Canada.

I have removed the expression from the article and will now look for a non-Canadian reference from some more neutral expert resource.

G. Robert Shiplett 00:33, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

iaea.org
iaea.org technical reports might be a reference source closer to NPOV.

Reference #10 in the Candu article appears to be mere bare-faced propaganda. Which of the big international audit firms validates that "economic viability" claim based on audit in China?

Candu is now part of SNC-Lavalin which already has a problematic corporate "advertising" article on en.wikipedia.

Note: contrary to the prior tone of this article, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited article details the serious incidents with NRX and NRU.

G. Robert Shiplett 00:58, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There are two fundamental power reactor technologies currently on the market - light-water reactors and heavy water reactors. In the light-water category there are a number of commercial contenders; in the heavy-water category there is one commercial contender: the CANDU reactor.  The CANDU reactor has roughly 10% of the global market, so by a numerical standard one might claim this is not evidence of success.  However, given the size of the reactor market and the fact that CANDU represents one of two fundamental technology variants to reach commercial success, there is a clear argument that CANDU was successful.


 * The Apple MAC computer has a desktop market share roughly comparable with that of CANDU, and this technology is described several times it the corresponding Wikipedia article as "success", presumably for reasons that transcend direct numerical comparison.


 * Whitlock (talk) 21:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

AECL employee edits
Current AECL employees should not be the source editors for this article any more that SNC-Lavalin should be the source editors for their article.

The state of Mac sales resulted in the ouster of Steve Jobs and his replacement be a Pepsi exec. The "success" of Apple is not the "Mac" any more than the "Success" of IBM is the IBM-PC or PS/2. American Motors was not a "success" except to their fans and wikipedia is explicitly not a fan-site.

If by "successful" AECL wishes to mean "deemed by AECL to be suitable for marketing" then we should say so. "Marketable" is an option - the current federal government in Canada favours "commercializable" or some such. "Successful" is not what the dissolution of Ontario Hydro could be termed by any neutral observer concerning that effort to cope with unmanageable debt, much of it tied to CANDU projects and poor ROI for those projects.

If AECL refuses to mention the documented problems in the AECL article then a wikipedia editor should intervene.

G. Robert Shiplett 23:24, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Criterion for unambiguous "successful"
Perhaps the major accidents documented in the NRX and NRU articles are what would make sense of "successful" in this context : "successful" in that it was not involved in a major accident. But that requires ignoring the interventions which were in fact required to avert major accidents with CANDU as documented in the CANDU reactor article.

Can we agree on "operationally successful, but not clearly financially or economically successful" ?

Why no link to a Canadian nuclear policy article if one insists on characterizing CANDU as unambiguously succesuful? Would a reader from Romania, as a non-nuclear physicist recent immigrant to Canada, agree? I should think not.

Should there be a link to the history of uranium production in Canada ? I would think so - more so than a link to "science and tech" in Canada, to which most any article on Canadian high-tech might link. The history of nuclear technology in Canada?

A wp search on the terms "nuclear" and "Canada" reveals many links more important here than simply "sci & tech" in Canada.

G. Robert Shiplett 23:50, 30 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Economically and technologically successful. Powering every second home in the Province of Ontario.  Generating more energy per kg of uranium than any other machine on earth - which means generating more energy per kg of *anything* than any commercial technology on earth, period.  Able to generate energy from the waste product of light-water reactors.  Hailed by the Chinese as the most successful reactor new-build project in their history (Qinshan plant).  One of only two fundamental reactor concepts to operating commercially on the planet, out of at least ten times that many in the starting field sixty years ago.  Able to refuel on-power, at 300 degrees C. and 100 atmospheres without missing a beat.  A safety record unparallelled by any other commercial nuclear design, and any other large-scale commerical electricity technology.


 * Feel free to add any links you think are needed.  (And I do not recommend reading the wp articles on AECL, NRX or NRU if you're serious about learning about those topics.)


 * Whitlock (talk) 01:37, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Canadian Encyclopedia not for citations
Canadian Encyclopedia is not a reliable source; it is instead a tertiary source like any other encyclopedia.

G. Robert Shiplett 18:43, 2 April 2012 (UTC)