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French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles
mdsolar writes with bad news for France and its nuclear industry. "France's nuclear industry is in turmoil after the country's main reactor manufacturer, Areva, reported a loss for 2014 of 4.8 billion euros ($5.3 billion) — more than its entire market value. The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva, which is among the biggest global nuclear technology companies. The loss puts its future — and that of France as a leader in nuclear technology — at risk. Energy and Environment Minister Segolene Royal said Wednesday she asked Areva and utility giant Electricite de France to work together on finding solutions, amid reports of a possible merger or other link-up. The government said in a statement that it's working closely with Areva to restructure and secure financing, and would 'take its responsibility as a shareholder' in future decisions about its direction. Areva reported Wednesday 1 billion euros in losses on three major nuclear projects in Finland and France, among other hits. Areva has lost money for years, in part linked to delays on those projects and to a global pullback from nuclear energy since the 2011 Fukushima accident."
And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
How much late? Our major nuclear power plant was 12 years late (despite also having just two of the original four reactors). :)
Ezekiel 23:20
I've been hearing that since the '80s.
once you have reactors, you're stuck with them for the better part of a century and when shit goes wrong, it goes really wrong.
can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Nuclear used to be cheap when directly connected to military money (and thus to tax money). Now it has to stand more and more on its own feet. I think it just ain't worth the hassle.
Makes me sad for the great French people who have been enticed to over-invest in this dud
Left and right are both useless but this is a private company.
Olkiluoto 3 was originally supposed to be in commercial production in 2009. Then it was postponed to 2011. Then 2013. And now, at the earliest, perhaps 2015. The whole project schedule has been overly optimistic and there have been numerous quality issues in welding, components and such. Apparently Areva was surprised about the Finnish officials being so strict about the quality guidelines and also failed to deliver all the design documentation to them in time (because in here, you simply don't build shit like this without plans). In 2009 they also threatened to delay the start of the final construction phase until TVO made changes to the contract in favor of Areva.
In 2012 Areva estimated the building costs being around 8,5 billion euros, which is quite a bit more than the shipping price of 3 billion.
So yeah, don't buy nuclear reactors from the French. Or cars for that matter.
The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended) have now charged Billions worth of 'late fees' to Areva. Areva promised the moon and can't deliver. It would be great if public projects in the US would include the same sort of strong rules as what the Finns did here. No more overtime and over budget as the norm when building roads and bridges. A project being late would mean that tax payer money would increase instead of dwindling.
Are they just incompetent, or do they do most of their work for the same government that owns a third of their stock and not have a lot of experience with real customers?
I might forgive projects being over time - but being over time should never be rewarded with more money, thus making the project over budget as well.
Hey, I've worked construction for much of my life. If you normally have fifteen rain-days per year, and you budget twenty - that thirty fifth rain-out is REALLY fucking with your schedule!
Stuff happens, and I'll easily accept a highway opening a month late, or a high-rise opening three months late. Just don't PAY THE CONTRACTORS for being late!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
They are both!
Also, Areva's reactors are so extremely large that special equipment is needed to make them. See this PDF file: How to Make Nuclear Cheap - The Breakthrough Institute. Quote: "Very large Gen III+ reactors have experienced construction delays and cost overruns."
The reactor was bought with a fixed price contract by a private company called TVO. Areva has not been getting any extra money out of Finland. They are trying to sue the company that bought the reactor, TVO, but that is still ongoing and there is a countersuit too.
So I, as a finnish tax payer, have no direct stake in this. Of course, electricity prices might go down, if the reactor finally came online.
I guess they are incompetent because they are having the same trouble with another reactor in France.
For a long time Areva was complaining that TVO, the company that bought the reactor in finland, was not doing everything required and that the safety requirements where somehow wrong, but since they have the same trouble in France with very favourable regulators - they must be incompetent.
The main problem has been to automation system. For the nuclear reactor safety standards, there must be two completely separate systems, so the other can be used as backup. I believe they have had a lot of trouble in creating two systems that are really separate, so that the other can really be used as a backup. Actual construction work at the site has been slowing down, because the designs just could not be finished.
There is something particular with the EPR and Olkiluoto 3 that is worth pointing out.
For the building of a french nuclear plant, the usual workshare is the following: Areva delivers the reactor equipment, while the EDF utility acts as the prime contractor for the construction of the plant.
For Olkiluoto 3, Areva took the lead, and operated as a turnkey plant manufacturer. This was actually part of a power struggle between Areva and EDF. You can see it did not turn out well.
Newer EPR plants (Flamanville, Taishan) reverted to a more traditional workshare.
"The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva"
Not according to Areva it hasn't.
http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...
"Today, public sector holdings (CEA, the French state and CDC) of group capital has risen close to 87%. 4% of AREVA’s share capital is float."
The French have a peculiar way of privatizing stuff. It sort of looks like the companies are private, but the state still ultimately owns them. And all these "private" companies are acting like global players. The problem is whose money are they playing with?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Just so people won't miss it. It's on the 20th, not the 23rd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_March_20,_2015
Additionally, over Germany it will only be a partial eclipse.
Nevertheless it's going to be interesting to see how our systems will cope. I can't find the article anymore but the solar capacity change will be somewhere between 5 to 15GW in only a few minutes.
Also Finnish nuclear safety regulator has been careful. French kinda assumed that the regulations were basically just bunch of text on a page that could be ignored if they felt like it (and any regulatory hurdles could be cleared with backroom dealings and "trust us" hand waving).
Not so. In Finland nuclear plant safety is Serious Business (0 accidents and we'd like to keep it that way) and the people watching over the industry actually do their jobs. French were not pleased to find this out in practice - any shoddy bits they've built (often using cheap foreign labor that may or may not be competent...) that hasn't been up to approved plans & specs has been systematically busted by the inspectors and re-designs/refits haven't exactly been easy or cheap. ...and since everything is built under a fixed price contract with hefty late fees built in, Areva is in deep doo-doo. Especially since they cannot "make a deal" to get out of the situation. Finnish side will happily drive them to bankruptcy, if needed, and squeeze every penny as per the original contract while accepting nothing less than what was contracted for.
Granted, the end result may be an incomplete nuclear power plant that will need a new contract with someone else to finish it...
This. France, as anyone who has actually lived it in will experience, holds some of the most duplicitous hypocrites I've ever had the displeasure of working with. Outwardly they're all culture and meritocracy and honour, but behind closed doors it's all the same bullshit as everywhere else, except with no sense that they're doing anything untoward. It's like they've never left their Revolutionary attitude of Righteous Harm - new Great Terror, same as the old Terror.
(I'm still pissed off at their bullshit freedom-of-speech marches following the Hebro massacre. CH have had more run-ins with the French government than with Islamic nutjobs. Of course the latter are worse in that they use summary execution rather than lawsuits and theats of imprisonment, but they're cut from the same cloth.)
The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.
More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"he USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,"
Heh, funny. The USSR had been virtually bankrupt since the 70s and spent a huge amount of what GDP it had on defense ti try and keep up with the USA. It still failed plus it plunged a hundred million people into a miserable existence of food queues and no prospects.
But you keep on dreaming the communist dream if you like. Whatever makes you happy.
Death per kilowatt, etc.
Many of these nuclear costs are because of irrational fear. If no amount of safety is enough, no amount of spending will be enough.
Nuclear is already far safer than other power generation, including numbers from Fukishima.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/
..And France is sinking like a rock. This is just one example.
Yes, the whole nuclear power industry started from scratch a couple of years ago when the Socialists got in.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They were caught red-handed cutting corners at the Olkiluoto site in Finland. Finns take security very seriously and hence the plant is already years late..
Yet another example of how interfering in the free market just ruins it for everyone.
If the communist Finns had just let the French build a quick and dirty version, they could have sorted out any resulting accidental deaths through the courts, thereby reducing the upfront costs and allowing the shareholders time to extract the profits before they could be wasted on compensation and paying government "safety" inspectors' exorbitant salaries.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear (specifically fission) power generation is cheap. All the safety systems, regulatory oversight, large construction projects, waste management/disposal, licensing, project management, environmental impact, financing and maintenance of nuclear power are tremendously expensive. And you cannot separate the power generation from the rest of those items.
it's actually more than that.
the company by all means should be already bankrupt. its just that french government ownership goes through couple of different ways to it, making it more than 70.
I mean, who the fuck would keep holdings in a company like this other than the french government? it should be bankrupt.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well as an example, the new thorium reactors don't even need cooling as the reaction is cut off immediately when there's a failure.
Thorium reactors don't need cooling? I think you don't understand the physics involved. Some newer reactor designs have passive cooling systems which are (theoretically) safer but they still need and have cooling systems. Fission generates heat which is used to drive turbines. If you have heat you must have a cooling system. It takes a substantial amount of time for a fission reactor to cool even once the reaction is shut down and you have to have some form of cooling system in place to do that.
Just recently: 100k people killing in an Oil War in Iraq.
Face it: we are programmed by a bunch of morally corrupt people with religious fervour. They call themselves "green".
Ahh, but delays actually make a huge difference.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...
It sounds like the European anti-nuke nutjobs have been paying attention to how the American crazies killed off the American nuclear industry.
See that "Preview" button?
Both the Russkies and the Chinese build fission reactors. LOTS of them, actually.
Just in the morally rotten west (thanks to all the Maoist propaganda operators who needed to monetize their AgitProp Dreck - oil and gaz were willing to pay) we are scared to hell from nuclear power.
If we were just remotely as "rational" and "enlightened" as we claim to be, we would build as many nuclear reactors as the Russkies and the Chinese. The truth is that we have become Sheeple who are willing victims to the AgitProp Wolves of all shades.
Just compare the number of people killed by nuclear/kWh and number of people killed by other sources of electrical energy. You will figure that with CURRENT reactors, it is the most humane technology of all.
It just does not resonate with Big Oil, Big War and Big Gaz.
I've been living that since the '80s.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended)
(and no pun made)
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They are in the similar ballpark, but without the horrendous dismantling costs. And renewable costs actually go down with time, not up. Also Germany still doesn't have a place for long term storage of nuclear waste. So I'd say long live Maoist Energy Sources.
I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,
The USSR started sinking after it stopped raping it's Warsaw Pact allies for food, manpower and natural resources. It's easy to focus on industrialization and modernization when you can just steal food from eastern European countries you have control over. My Romanian and Ukrainian friends have stories about that...
I also notice your timeline of the great successes of the USSR seems to bounce over Stalin, under whom most of the modernization and industrialization took place (Lenin was only in charge for roughly 7 years.)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n...
Solar power displaces the use of those fuel based methods. They are used less, not more.
I see two possible outcomes for Germany: either the currently operating nukes will be kept running, or the nation's baseload will to totally converted over to lignite, in which case the Greens will declare a great victory. Carbon matters for Greens when it suits them.
I looked at all the comments. There don't seem to be any that mention the underlying issue. Areva makes HUGE reactors. Management of large constructions causes expensive problems. Dealing with a disaster in a huge reactor is also far more difficult.
Quote: "Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs. Most are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction."
The Areva design does not have "passive or inherent safety".
...has all nuclear operations problems solved. No real accidents in US Navy nuclear reactor ops so far. And they operate as many reactors as france at one time in much more difficult circumstances.
Compare that to the uniformed fuckers of Britain and Russia. They manage to leak from their reactors all the time. Because they have a relaxed attitude to engineering. Rickover booted the politicos and social engineers out of the USN reactor business. He was much hated for this.
But - Results matter.
The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended) have now charged Billions worth of 'late fees' to Areva. Areva promised the moon and can't deliver. It would be great if public projects in the US would include the same sort of strong rules as what the Finns did here. No more overtime and over budget as the norm when building roads and bridges. A project being late would mean that tax payer money would increase instead of dwindling.
Most large utility contracts do have such clauses. They are called liquidated damages or "LDs". In new gas turbine , steam turbine, and wind turbine contracts, there are late fees for drawing and documentation, usually around $500-2,000 per day per document. Then there are late delivery LDs, which vary depending on the equipment but $50,000-100,000 per day for a gas or steam turbine isn't uncommon. Lastly, there are startup LDs, which are late fees for if the equipment isn't functionally complete and operating by a certain date. Startup LDs are a lot more of a headache because one vendor's delay often causes a delay with other vendors. Proving what is a "delay" and who caused it can be a major hassle. I'm glad I am not involved in this particular project because it sounds like a disaster.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What you are calling a growth curve is often called a learning curve. It is the idea that costs reduce as more of the technology is deployed. People get bright ideas as they work in the field, going to greater scale means more can be produced with less labor, etc... You are correct that nuclear power gets more expensive with time. http://thinkprogress.org/clima... There are technologies where the more common behavior is seen. Wind and solar power are growing exponentially owing to lower and lower cost as more are deployed. At their current growth rates either can replace all the world's energy demand around the year 2035. http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
Nuclear will make baseload 24/7/365 with PLANNED downtime
are you saying nuclear has NO unplanned downtime ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Uranium was an awful decision for power generation, chosen only because it could also be used in weapons.
Thorium is a waste product in mining, and it only comes in one naturally-occurring isotope, so it doesn't need expensive enrichment like uranium.
Thorium reactors follow the U-233 decay chain, and run entirely as a liquid, low-pressure system, which can be diluted easily and, if necessary, mixed with boron for complete emergency control.
Conventional uranium fuel comes as metallic rods - which cannot be diluted. High-pressure uranium reactors should be universally retired - they are expensive and unsafe.
Renewable costs don't go down with time. Windmills break down and solar panels lose efficiency as they get nearer to their end of life.
Just go ask California or anywhere else which has had these for 20 years.
This is a loss of $24,090 per employee. In the US, this company would fire 1/3 of its employees, demand the rest work 60 hour weeks and would recover in two years from a loss like this. None of that can happen in Europe. Instead the government will give them a 'loan'. They can't really buy more shares to resolve the issue at this point since the shares should be worth nothing.
Ukraine was not a country before 1991. Just saying ;-)
The USSR started sinking because eastern European countries and most of the union republics were a bottomless drain on the economy, not other way around.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This already happens a lot in Belgium. It just does not happen often enough and not all the time. Obviously companies have adapted to the situation and will give longer times than needed.
It will also increase the price, so it is often used only for highways and the like.
Companies can even sometimes get an extra bonus if they are ready earlier. Understand that a highway closed for 8 hours is probably worse then a road where 3 people live for a whole year.
We also see billboards with the estamated price of the project. This will obviously not work all the time.
Where I live, I received a letter from the city how long it would take to replace a bidge. A few weeks later, I receved a second letter (well, a small booklet) to inform me that it would take several months longer. This due to the worse state the bridge was in and thus more repair was needed.
They were ready on the day that was promised in the second letter (one day early I think).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Your "miserable existence of food queues and no prospects" rhetoric suggests to me that you are interested in beating some political drum. Whether a product is unavailable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in socialist societies) or unaffordable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in capitalist societies) is immaterial to the person who needs it."
Whatever. Next time you see 50 metre long food queue at a supermarket that has next to nothing on the shelves in a western country then maybe we can have this debate.
Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.
Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.
Bingo, we have winner there. So if governments internalized externalities by charging polluters to pollute, making the price of coal reflect its true cost, then the price of nuclear energy would be more favorable in comparison than now. Without those conditions, we are now all subsidizing the most polluting forms of energy generation, such as coal, by making polluting free.
I know the free market libertarian types will scream bloody murder about the proposal that pollution be taxed, just because it is a tax and they reflexively hate all taxes. But hold on you free market libertarian type people! If the government returned payments from polluters directly to the public in the form of checks, instead of letting the crooks who run our government squander it, then the net tax rate would be zero because the total tax dollars collected from polluters would equal the total tax dollars returned to the public. There is a redistributionary aspect to this tax, and those are typically regarded as a bad because they create price distortions. But in this case it is a good because it corrects, not creates, a price distortion by redistributing dollars away from polluters in proportion to the cost of their polluting.
There is a noteworthy point there: taxation is not a burden. The burden of Government is not taxation but instead spending inefficiency. Consider the following: You can go to the grocery store and pay $2.00 to buy a bag of onions. Alternatively, the government can tax you $2.00 and provide you bag the same bag of onions. The tax payer is rationally indifferent to those alternatives, therefore the tax is not a burden to the tax payer. What makes government a burden is spending inefficiency: In actuality, the government taxes you $2.00 and instead of giving you $2.00 worth onions it buys a tobacco farmer subsidy, anti-marijuana law enforcement, spyware to read your e-mail, and corporate welfare in the form of bad loans to Solyndra or some other boondoggle. What fraction does go to anything which is of value to the public, such as perhaps housing, is filtered through government contractors who capture most of the dollars for themselves and creates unemployment by offering an incentive to not work.
Because the public would pay money for the government not to do some of those things government spending efficiency can be negative. For example, with low government spending efficiency the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $3.00 if the government uses its $2.00 to purchase $1.00 worth of harm to the taxpayer. With high government spending efficiency, the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $-1.00, that is, the tax payer gives up two dollars but gains $3.00. In practice that does not happen. If it did then Wall Street investors would all have been replaced by government bureaucrats, if they can earn that rate of return.
So if the government both taxes pollution and returns the tax revenues to the public as dollars then taxation is not a net social burden. And the reduction in pollution is a net social benefit.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Krushchev did some poor investments and by the time Breznev came around the economy started to stagnate. Too many resources were kept on the military industrial side of things at the same time as the rest of the industry collapsed. When Gorbachev came around they found they had little to no oil left they could economically recover at the same time they were stuck on an expensive and useless war on Afghanistan. They needed to replace their oil industry equipment with more modern technology and they did not have the funds to do it themselves anymore.
Yeah the economy under Stalin was wildly successful. Even when Lenin was in power a large part of the time it was Stalin pulling the strings of it all. Even if the regime was murderous you cannot deny it was economically successful. A large part of the success was due to the large industrialization drives. The national electrification plan, the heavy industries, making education and housing available for everyone, creating a middle class and increasing productivity, etc. This is something which can be done in a country much like the USSR was. A country with a lot of natural resources and manpower but poor infrastructure. It could also have been done with a lot less strife. Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan managed to do it. The problem was the Soviet Union wanted to do what they did in two decades in just one. Instead of starting with light industry first and do things progressively they just squeezed the farmers out of everything they had and jumped straight into the heavy industry.
I am also fine with natural gas, to be honest. Russia has been a reliable supplier even during the worst cold war days.
You may wish to ask Ukraine about how reliable a supplier of natural gas Russia is.
"95% of all Slashdot
I'm not an American so go fuck yourself.
mdsolar may be anti-nuclear power, but that doesn't make the story any less alarming. One of the leaders in nuclear generating technology is essentially bankrupt.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Corium contains water soluble elements. Once the cladding is melted it's a mess.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Since the CEA is a French public institution, this makes the French states owning more than 80% of Areva http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...
I think you misunderstand liberalism, pollution has a cost to other people, ignoring them is not libertarian.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
There is plenty of evidence Areva EPR design was the result of lack of innovation. They designed a reactor without any major simplification, without using passive safety, just adding more and more engineered safety.
With the current level of insane nuclear regulatory complexity Areva's design choices were the touch of death. Yet, I think China will manage to get their EPRs online, showing that even with all of their extra costs ariving from their design, a huge slice of the nuclear problem comes after the reactor is designed and licensed, but actual construction starts. China has a more realistic nuclear regulatory framework, like South Korea and India. In those countries reactors are being built at 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost in the USA or Europe.
A lot less than solar and wind.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!