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Toshiba to Pay $5.4 Billion for Westinghouse
Philip writes "Business electronics firm Toshiba is bidding for 100% control of Westinghouse - famous for making blenders and LCD televisions, but principally in the business of building nuclear reactors. 'By 2020 the market for nuclear power generation is expected to grow 50 percent compared to 2005,' Toshiba CEO Nishida said at a London news conference. 'Toshiba is responding to this challenge by acquiring Westinghouse.'"
Small, safe and convenient nuclear laptop batteries, right here right now. :)
Does the DOE have any limitations on foreign corporations handling parts of our Nuclear Energy programs?
Is anyone else a little concerned about this?
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
(Better yet, if the campaign succeeds AND one of the two fusion reactor projects produces cheap energy, we could eliminate all conventional and all fission reactors entirely and have just two or three fusion reactors per continent.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wouldn't certain countries have to abandon their fear of opening new reactors? After all, building nuclear reactors in some developing nations violates security restrictions. Some European countries already have a decent take rate on nuclear power, at least from what I've heard, I'm too lazy to do any research.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
From blenders to refrigerators to Nuclear power plants. Sounds like something was put on a back burner for a while. Just a little difference from an electric motor to nuclear reactors!
GE has been doing that for decades - add in locomotives; lightbulbs, and plastics as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
As far as the next generation of "traditional" fission reactors, I guess I've been more impressed with GE's ESBWR , than Westinghouse's APxxx ...
IANANE (I am not a Nuclear Engineer), but BWRs seem to have fewer problems (no steam gnerators to leak/plug up, no vessle head degradation) and are theroetically more efficent (single cycle)...
I wonder if anyone is going to make a bid for GENE (General Electric Nuclear Energy)...
I also wonder why we dont hear more about CANDU reactors . They use natural uranium instead of enriched uranium, which could provide more peaceful energy in unstable areas of the worls
Toshiba is well known (and for many despised) in Japan for being a missile-building defense contractor for Japan's army that they aren't supposed to have because of previous war-mongering. Now they are buying nuclear production capabilities. Anyone? Concerns?
I personally welcome our new laptop-manufacturing overlords.
In the UK the BBC website recently ran articles pointing to upcoming reviews of existing nuclear power plants and the impact of bring new plants online.
As noted before the environmentalist camp has had some of it's big guns come out in support of nuclear power as the only alternative available to stave off global warming.
Probably the various political power bases have decided nuclear power is the way to go and have given the spin doctors orders to soften public reaction.
Good news for Canada with a mature nuclear technology, substantial Uranium resources, not to mention being oil and hydro rich.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The rest of the old Westinghouse has been gone for many years. When you see a new "Westinghouse" consumer product, such as a lcd television, that's a separate individual or company that purchased the right to use the brand name in a certain product area, and then contracted with an asian manufacturer to produce the product.
The same point is true of "Polaroid" lcd televisions; an investor bought the right to use the brand name for electronic products at Polaroids bankruptcy auction, and then contracts with asian manufacturers to bring in product.
Right now, we have approximately 800 megawatt-hours generated in this state by wind turbines. That's the equivalent of one or two coal-fired electric plants. Our problem right now is one of distribution -- we barely have enough capacity to carry this energy now from the windy part of the state to the Minneapolis/St. Paul region. There are plans underway to build more distribution lines, but those always take a long time and stir up controversy.
Of course, this doesn't take into consideration anything to do with current oil- or natural gas-based consumption. As you said, converting any significant percentage of vehicles to hydrogen fuels would obviously require massive amounts of power we're not yet generating. And it takes lots of time and money to physically erect more turbines. But there's a lot less regulation required and a lot less complaining about wind power vs. nuclear power.
One advantage to hydrogen is that it could be shipped via truck. Rather than invest in thousands of miles of costly transmission lines (and pay the 10% power cost in transmission losses), hydrogen plants could be built next to new reactors located out in the Nevada and Utah deserts, and the hydrogen trucked to market.
John
On top of that we would have probably retired at least some of the U.S. nuclear plants by now. ALL of them are based on inherently unsafe, antiquated designs. I spend a LOT of time talking about nuclear and alternative energy with my girlfriend's housemates, one of whom has a couple of books out on the subject of humanity's future and who is getting a column in The Fifth Estate , a leading anarchist rag, and another of whom is a professor who used to work for ARPA as a programmer/engineer and who has worked in certification of nuclear power plants. Granted, these are by far the two with the most impressive pedigrees along these lines, but anyway...
Our current reactors are pretty sloppy, and since we can't build any new ones (due to misled hippies) we keep the old ones running long past the time when they should be decommissioned. Thus we build more coal plants. Every year, the U.S. alone puts more radioactive material into the atmosphere as a result of burning coal to develop electricity than all of the nuclear accidents, tests, and bombings put together have done. EVERY YEAR! In 2000 alone it was approximately 1250 metric tons of uranium (Something like 0.7% of which is U-235) and 5000 metric tons of Thorium. In fact, if we could capture that material and use it for nuclear fuel, it would actually produce more energy output than the coal that formerly contained it.
Only about half of our coal consumption is for the generation of electricity. That means we put out more like twice that in 2000. And of course, it's only gone up since.
Wind power actually surpassed Nuclear a little while ago, in terms of energy production. However, wind is not highly reliable. This is the primary attraction of coal or nuclear power; you can get it when you want it. It's ideal for industrial power consumption, such as that for manufacturing or for high-energy-consumption research like running particle colliders.
My basic recipe for fixing the power problem is:
1) Shoot all the people who stopped nuclear plants from being built while not stopping coal plants from being built.
2) Build some new nuclear reactors, and some breeder reactors for reprocessing the fuel. Also build wind farms as feasible, because using no fuel is infinitely desirable as compared to using some fuel.
3) Decomission as many coal plants as possible.
4) Return to step 2 (you could return to step 1 but hopefully all those people will be dead already.)
Why am I using such strong language? Like shooting people? Because cancer rates doubled in the industrial revolution. Why? Because they started burning an absolute shitpot of coal. Now, here we are many moons later, making the same idiot mistake. I blame the people who are responsible for the continued rule of the coal plants for the non-smoking-related lung cancer deaths in this nation. With cheaper electricity, we'd probably already be driving electric or hydrogen vehicles...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Famed investor Peter Lynch says to start worrying when companies "diworsify" as he calls it. When companies find themselves unable to gain additional marketshare in the industries they already compete in, they tend to go around buying into other industries at inflated prices. Often they buy into industries that require different know how to run effectively, and many botch the job once things have played out in a few years. Think of all the internet startups that were overvalued, bought up, and mismanaged. The same thing happens in other fields as well.
There is incentive on the part of executives to diversify, as managers can then get promoted, whereas there was little room to grow before. In the short term the stock goes up and executive salaries also rise, but in the long term, mismanaged divisions only weigh a company down, offsetting profits from the healthy divisions and hurting long term investors.
There is a rising market for nuclear reactors, so this might turn out to be good thing for Toshiba, but I'd do more research before plopping down some coin for Toshiba stock.
And the problem with that is the low density of hydrogen. Hydrogen in liquid form has 10% of the density of gasoline. And it is cryogenic, requiring a large amount of energy to put it into a cryogenic state and then a well-insulated tank and more energy to keep it cryogenic. You could easily have to send 15+ trucks in place of 1 truck with gasoline to get out the same amount of energy. Not to mention the amount of hydrogen you spend powering those trucks. People complain about the inefficiencies of power lines... its nothing compared to the inefficiencies of a "green" hydrogen economy.
Other news sites are saying 300% growth by 2015. Toshiba is paying
34 times earnings, for a business that they expect to grow by 12% per
year - unless they think that they will get significant synergy with
their existing nuclear businesses, then I think that they are significantly
overpaying for the business.
I think it's most important achievement is bringing Tesla's idea of alternating current to the consumer.
Absolutely. Westinghouse build the first A/C power station out in Telluride, Colorado in 1891, with design help from Tesla and $100,000 from L.L. Nunn. While we're on the subject, this July 9th will be Telsa's 150th birthday, so light up those Tesla Coils to celebrate; we'll be doing up here so in Telluride!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Maybe if they buried all the electric, it would train all the backhoes to stop cutting Internet fiber! "Hey, I got a 50-50 chance of cutting the Internet for these poor schlubs, or getting fried. Hmm... Think I'll move on now..." :)