Toshiba Shares Plummet After Warning of 'Billions' in Losses (cnn.com)

Toshiba's troubles keep piling up. From a report on CNN Money: The Japanese firm's shares plunged 20% on Wednesday, after the company warned it is expecting billions of dollars in losses from its takeover of a U.S. nuclear construction business last year. "We're still figuring out the exact numbers, but it could reach up to several hundred billion yen," CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa told reporters Tuesday. Toshiba's U.S. nuclear-power subsidiary Westinghouse acquired CB&I Stone & Webster late last year, when Toshiba was still struggling to recover from a $1.2 billion accounting scandal. Toshiba's shares dived in the months following that scandal, which led to a major management reshuffle after the Japanese conglomerate admitted it had doctored financial results for years. The company reported a loss of 460 billion yen ($3.9 billion) for 2015.

Comments

Re:Not smart business

[blindseer]

If current trends continue, solar will be more economical within a decade. While the cost of wind and solar are going down, the cost of nuclear is going UP.

Do you think that maybe, possibly, perhaps the costs of nuclear power has gone up because we've stopped building them for 40 years? The people that knew how to do this are all retired, senile, or dead now. We see this in every industry that prices go down as experience improves. This can even be seen as a single project, like a large building, progresses. The first ten stories take longer to build than the next ten, and the next ten take less time yet.

Do you think that maybe, possibly, perhaps that solar prices have gone down because of government subsidies? Forget that other energy sectors got subsidies, that's irrelevant. What I'm talking about is that while no nuclear power reactors have been built for 40 years the government has been giving the solar power industry all kinds of money and other benefits.

Now, if perhaps, maybe, we'd have been treating solar and nuclear the same I could argue that nuclear would be cheaper than solar. Even after decades of holding nuclear power back, and giving solar power a push, we still see solar power lagging in some very important ways. Nuclear power has a lower carbon footprint than solar, and nuclear works in all weather.

For 40 years the cost of new nuclear was effectively infinite, there were no licenses issued and so no matter how much one spent they got no new capacity. Now that we see some people in the government willing to grant a license then perhaps we can see nuclear power prices go down. If they keep issuing licenses then it will continue to go down.

Nuclear power has been caught in this death spiral, it costs more because no licenses were issued, no licenses were issued because it cost so much to get into nuclear power.

After holding nuclear back for 40 years, giving solar a lead, then you claim that in another 10 years that solar might be cheaper than nuclear. Well, what do you think would have happened if we'd have held solar back for 50 years and then let it finally compete?