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They claim that there were about 30,000 jobs in the nuclear industry at year-end 1992. A more realistic estimate is about 18,000. There are several possible reasons for AECL's overestimation of employment, including: double counting (for example, several references indicate that uranium industry employees were counted twice); counting total employment levels at companies whose business is only partly nuclear, instead of just counting the nuclear-related jobs; overestimating the number of companies in the nuclear manufacturing private sector, and using biased assumptions for extrapolating employment levels at those companies that were not actually polled. The most significant overestimate is for employment among "private sector suppliers". Ernst & Young estimate employment in that sector for 1992-93 at 8,500, whereas this study estimates that the actual 1992 figure was about 2,000. Nuclear Prospects Ontario Hydro has decided to shut down, rather than rebuild part of the Bruce "A" Nuclear Generating Station. It is possible that Ontario Hydro's other nuclear stations will also be phased out early in order to avoid costly retubing or other major rehabilitation work. Staffing levels can be expected to decline proportionally. It is widely expected that Ontario Hydro's virtual monopoly on electricity generation in Ontario will be broken, making any new nuclear construction virtually unthinkable. A competitive market will inevitably lean towazds more efLicient supply alternatives with shorter construction lead-times such as natural gas-fired cogeneration and combined cycle plants. The prospects for new nuclear construction in any province outside of Ontario are almost as slim. Canada is the world's lazgest producer and exporter of uranium, and Cameco (the privatized former crown corporation in uranium mining and refining) has seen a recent increase in stock price. However, even this sector of the industry is facing a serious challenge over the medium- to long- term. Huge military stockpiles of uranium in the USA and Russia, as well as fuel recovered from nuclear weapons will likely make serious inroads on the market share of the Canadian uranium mining and refining industry. The AECL Isotope Business Long thought to be the one "profitable" division of AECL, the former Radiochemical Company of AECL was privatized in 1991 as "Nordion International Inc.", when it was sold to MDS Health Group. To secure the sale, AECL was obligated under a 23 yeaz contract to provide radioisotopes at a fixed price. Several factors have turned this commercialization into a fiasco. First, AECL's NRX reactor was forced to shut down in 1993. This has made radioisotope production solely dependent on the NRU reactor, which itself is experiencing technical problems and higher-than-expected operating costs 3