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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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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/
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.