Our History

Stern Laboratories Inc. is an employee-owned private Canadian company located in Hamilton, Ontario, in the former Westinghouse Canada manufacturing plant.  We lease approximately 25,000 square feet from Hamilton Port Authority.

The laboratory research and development work was started at this location in 1962 by our founder, Frank Stern.  It began when a fossil-fired boiler, which was originally installed for testing marine steam turbines for the Canadian Navy, was converted to provide the steam/water flow for tests on CANDU fuel at operating conditions.  The Westinghouse Systems Test Laboratory grew steadily during the sixties and seventies as CANDU reactors came into service and the requirements grew for experiments to support reactor licensing and verification of computer safety codes.  Customers supplied the equipment to upgrade the hydraulic facilities and installed new state of the art power supplies for testing.

In January 1988, Westinghouse Canada sold their Atomic Power Division to another company who in turn sold the assets of the Systems Test Laboratory to Frank Stern and the laboratory employees.  Stern Laboratories was formed in April 1988, taking over the existing contracts, and with a lease of the premises from Westinghouse has continued to grow and prosper.  As a private company with no affiliation to Westinghouse or any other vendor, Stern Laboratories is able to serve many customers in the nuclear industry worldwide.

Company and customer investment in upgraded facilities and hardware continues. The laboratory has facilities to perform heat transfer experiments at normal and abnormal conditions for CANDU, BWR and PWR applications, a modern computer data acquisition systems and a 16 MW DC power supply with 13 individually controlled zones.  It is one of the highest power and most versatile heat transfer facilities in the world.