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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."
Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"
When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.
"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
And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies, which is global warming. And they're still lower than the costs of switching over to entirely "renewable" technologies which, in the immediate future, would leave a substantial gap between consumption and generation.
Right. Having the government cover all of your major liabilities, getting to write off massive debts, pass all of your cost overruns onto local consumers without them having a say in the manner, and so on, that's all "paying their own way", right? In nuclear power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized. And it's *still* been very difficult to find investors. Nuclear has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.
Here's a paper going into the various massive ways nuclear has been subsidies. And they still can't bloody manage to stay afloat. It's one of the few industries with a negative growth curve - where technology gets more expensive with time, not cheaper.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"
When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.
you mean the basic engineering error where the project manager wouldn't sign off due to the mistake made in concrete formulation so he was fired and a more lenient approver installed in his place?
Every reactor will become old tech in a few decades. And people aren't going to change, so they'll continue to build them in awful places.
"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.
Face it: nuclear is expensive.
It's not just neutron bombardment either. Your fuel is producing almost every element in the periodic table, anisotropically and varying across time. It's pretty much the worst situation one could come up with from a containment standpoint inside the fuel even before you factor in neutron bombardment.
Then there's the nature of nuclear disasters: they're disasters in slow motion. The upside is that few people usually die from them because there's usually plenty of time to get away. The downside is that they take bloody forever and a king's ransom to clean up, where it's even possible. Picture, for example, an accident at Indian Point that would increase NYC residents' rate of cancer over the next 10 years by two to three orders of magnitude. You could evacuate over days to weeks and it'd have little impact on public health. But you'd be having to pay for the loss and cleanup of New York City. That is, of course, an extreme case, but it's an illustration of the financial challenge faced by an industry that deals with large amounts of chemicals that are incredibly toxic even in the minutest quantities. Screwups can turn out to be REALLY BIG screwups.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
It requires an upfront investment AND an ending investment (after closing the old plants) that's higher than all the upfront investments combined!
That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.
In case of the new British power plant there are not only upfront investments, there is also a guarantee for the power price that is twice the going rate and this guarantee is extended for the whole lifetime of the power plant and will be adjusted for inflation over that time.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.
And from a tech point it's entirely true. In this case it's the politics killing it.
No one wants (politically) to build new nuclear plants. No one wants to build coal plants either. Enough people don't want renewables blotting large areas of the landscape. The energy has to come from somewhere so those old, dirty coal plants and well-past-their-retire-date, old and less safe than new tech nuclear plants keep getting extension after extension because people really don't want blackouts.
The problem here is all politics, not technology.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
All of Areva's renewables investments combined are less than 10% of their business. And they're performing far better than their core nuclear business. I find it amazing that you argue that they shouldn't have invested in the few projects they're involved in that are actually paying off.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment.
And of course, you usually get the public/government to pay for the downstream costs like storage of waste and de-commissioning.
If only it wasn't for those pesky Health and Safety rules, it would be a licence to print money.
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 is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf Look at page 11.
> Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel
Too true. But it is also true that reactor construction has a history of going overbudget on average by two times, making it one of the most consistently bad investments in history.
> Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects
Also very true. Which is why wind and solar are the fastest growing sources of power in history: a large wind farm can go from napkin sketch to pumping electrons in 18 months. Residential PV can be completely installed in 2 weeks. Arranging financing for these projects is akin to arranging a car loan. The $30 billion needed for 5 years for a reactor? Not so easy.
AREVA's losses have more to do with poor investments in African mining operations than to do with the Olkiluoto setbacks, as well as other poor investment decisions they appear to have made over the last 10 years.Olkiluoto is a big chunk as well, but its not the majority of their debt problems.
And as far as Olkiluoto, they were simply unprepared to pull off that first of a kind project by themselves, and the Finish supply and regulatory elements faltered as well, a perfect storm of problems. But this is more poor execution than a technology issue. Other plants, including the EPR plants in China, are being completed on a reasonable schedule, more driven by money than anything else.
So, tell me about the number of fatalities associated with coal power. Include coal-mining deaths, since that's the only reason for them.
I note that there was a coal-mining accident in Ukraine the other day. It killed 30 people. Just that one accident.
Chernobyl killed about 60. Over the period since the accident, since that includes thyroid cancer deaths that are estimated to have happened due to the accident.
Oh, and since Chernobyl, the USA alone has suffered in excess of 830 coal mining deaths (in excess because I don't want to find a breakdown of 1986 coal mining deaths by month/day to allow a more exact number. But 1987 to 2014 add up to more than 830 by themselves).
So, coal is definitely safer. It pollutes, it does the CO2 thing, and it kills more people in normal operations that the worst nuclear disaster in history. Yeah, definitely safer...
Oh, and did you know that wildlife in the Chernobyl area is in much better shape than outside the exclusion zone?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The Ukraine mine had 32 this month. 101 died there in November 2007, 57 more the next month.
I grew up near a nuclear plant. We didn't know it was there except that the restricted building zone near the plant was full of baseball diamonds, beaches and nature trails. No, really.
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.
Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.
so? It's rendered a tract of land uninhabitable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
I'm not sure anyone's living on top of that mess either, and it's by far the only one. OOh here's a better one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Fun fact: not only is nuclear best in terms of death per kWh, it also renders the least land unusable per kWh generated. And yes that includes all the nuclear accidents.
Basically you're falling into the classic irrationality suffered by lots of people when dealing with nuclear. The events are very, very VERY rare and generally large. That makes them unpredictable (and therefore scary) and large (therefore newsworthy). If a nuclear accident happens anywhere in the world you hear about it.
Humans are generally bad at assessing the risks of rare events. Nuclear events are rare, very newsworthy and "scary" because radation is something out of most people's experience.
That doesn't make your gut feeling correct. Anf for every chernobyl you can point out (which is precisely one), there are hundreds of mining accidents, fly ash accidents, coal seam fires, and so on.
Like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Have you ever heard about it? Say what you like about Chernobyl, but that accident you've probably not heard of unless you're (a) British and (b) over about 30 killed nearly 3x the number of people as Chernobyl (including cancer deaths).
and anything might happen now.
Well technically yes, but this illustrates my point. You're letting fear of the unknown completely dominate your risk assessments. Just because all the atoms in a box of gas might rush to one end (theoretically possible, statistically unlikely) doesn't mean it is ever likely to happen. So while "anything" might happen, it might still not be likely to happen before the heat death of the universe.
In order for the materials to reach a critical mass, there would have to be something to concentrate them. After that, what would happen is it would get hot (it almost certainly wouldn't even be prompt critical), melt, mix with some molten rock, become diluted and go subcritical again in short order.
As I suggested above - I grew up in coal country.
Yep. Score another one for poor risk assessment on the part of humans. We down-rate risks which are know to us over ones we don't understand. You're used to coal based risks and unused to nuclear based ones, so your assessment of them is way off.
The concerns you bring up are serious, but they are manageable. Chernobyl - not so manageable, huh?
Chernobyl is now pretty much managed. It's sitting there glowing away slowly and otherwise doing very little. They're currently building a new cover to go over it precisely to manage any remaining risks.
Fukishima? That has polluted cubic miles of ocean already, much of it headed toward America's west coast.
Yes we can detect the Fukishima radiation on the West coast. Sounds terrible, eh? Well, no. That actually says more about the astonishing sensitivity of nuclear detectors than it does about Fukishima.
The radation level is 8 disintergrations per cubic meter per second. That's 10 atoms per cubic meter! That amount is phenomenally small and is a testament to the sensitivity of the instruments. It's also far below (about 1%) of the natural background radation of seawater, and far FAR below the level of background radation if you either live at altitude or live on granite or other volcanic substances.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Then learn to live without technology
I agree! Modern medicine and agriculture is sooooo overrated.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Does that also count all the land from which the fissionables were mined? Several people here are pointing to coal mines, but they make no mention of mining operations that support the nuclear industries.
Not sure, but given the difference in energy density (6 orders of magnitude IIRC), the stats are not in coal's favour.
You claim that Chernobyl is "managed"?
It is now, yes.
In the weeks after the accident, all the management that was possible was performed.
Yes, and that is a form of management. The GP claimed that it was unmanaged, which is patently false.
. Hundreds of workers sacrificed themselves to dump the concrete on top of the site. Wikipedia isn't the go-to place for information, but you've already used it. Wikipedia will suffice to make my own point.
Uh... for someone quoting wikipedia, you need to actually read it. The "hundreds" you refer to is actually 60.
Today, the only "management" being done, is to man the gates that block access to the exclusion zone.
Apparently they're building a new cover. But so? What extra management needs to be done? Again the GP claimed that it is/was unmanaged. If you need to keep people out, and that's all you need to do and you are doing it then you are managing it.
About sixty dead, huh? I don't accept that, any more than I accept the inflated figures of a million dead.
OK, so a few hundred dead then? What do you accept? Either way, it's still safer than the alternatives by a long way. The UN originally predicted about 4000 deaths due to cancer, but that used a linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure which is looking less and less likely to be correct and seriously overesimates the effect of radiation.
Nonetheless, the numbers are small, very small. And this is the worst ever disaster from a powerplant of a sort never built in the west (strongly positive feedback coefficient) and that no longer exists (all remaining RBMKs have been modified to a much lower void coefficient).
By comparison, the coal industry pollution in the US shortens about 24,000 lives per year of which 2,800 apparently are due to cancer. So, even accepting the enlarged numbers, the total worldwide deaths from the worst ever nuclear accident are around 1/10 of the deaths *per year* in the US alone from coal pollution. And that's ignoring the minors.
So, either way, nuclear is vastly safer than coal. You have to bump the number of deaths quite high before it reaches the safety levels of the next-most-safe which IIRC is either solar or wind.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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