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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.
And Uber is projected to lose 2.6 billion next year.
Funny how that works.
It seems to me they'll always have that to fall back on. I assume they have all sorts of patent money coming in from that. But yeah, nuclear construction sounds expensive.
Link about Toshiba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think the issue is the building as it is being designed and the poor engineering controls at Westinghouse. Add in the issues related to improper N&Ds by Westinghouse's quality engineering, it just means ballooned cost.The work is solid, but the rework due to poor engineering controls and wastage is MASSIVELY expensive from the people I know on the sites.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Media just likes to blow things out of proportion as usual. Toshiba is doing fine, and will keep doing fine.
See what happens when you fsck with the alt-f4 keyboard mapping?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Oh sure. One of the most long lasting and devastating industries in the world and red tape is the problem. /s
No. You are the problem. Regulation is necessary for safety and competition. So tired of lazy right wingers and their "if we just got rid of the red tape" bullshit.
I believe in nuclear power. But corner cutting cannot be allowed. If you can't do it without putting everyone at risk for your own profits, then you don't get to do it.
Oh sure. One of the most long lasting and devastating industries in the world and red tape is the problem.
Coal has red tape? But I believe in coal. Corner cutting cannot be allowed. If you can't do it without putting everyone at risk for your own profits, then you don't get to do it.
Bleep the whole bleeping company. Absolutely the worst customer service for retail products I've ever run across. If only I'd read some of the forum columns about their refusal to honor warranties before I'd bought a TV set, I could have saved myself a lot of pain.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
poor engineering controls at Westinghouse
There were issues with quality at a modular unit manufacturing site in Louisiana, but otherwise there have only been the expected challenges when building a large first of a kind plant. Yes, it is expensive, but once built the plant can run for 80 to 100 years and pay for itself many times over.
nuclear plants spend months offline for maintenance and reconditioning, and take months more to fully go online. .
Wow, how clearly wrong. Nuclear plants have the highest capacity factor of any other source, around 90% availability. They only shut down for short periods for refueling and maintenance, and this is scheduled for low electricity demand windows in the spring and fall.
Yes, shale gas has made other sources less profitable and challenging, and renewable market subsidies have exacerbated pricing challenges. But some states are started to realize that nuclear's societal cost is much lower when you consider the high number of well paying jobs and tax revenue it generates.
N/M.
Whatever happened to their semiconductor business? I recall a time they used to fab MIPS R4600 CPUs
It's not regulatory red tape, it's cheap fossil fuels. US natural gas spot prices dropped from $14 / MMBTU in 2006 to around $2.60 in 2016. Over the same period nuclear plants under construction were completed, but
Prior to that nuclear had to weather a 66% drop in coal prices from the 1970s to 2001 and a 8% drop in oil prices from 1980 to 1998.
There is really one and only one compelling economic argument for nuclear at this point: the climate change costs of fossil fuels are externalized, amounting to an involuntary public subsidy of fossil fuels.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. OK, And you're modded "insightful" Toshiba (Westinghouse) has decades of experience in the nuclear industry. Their Westinghouse division is one of the oldest players. I'm certain they understand the costs quite well. What you're seeing here is something else (accounting or engineering controls issues at the company they purchased, perhaps) Reactors only go down for months at a time when something major needs to be replaced. Steam generators. Turbines. entire cooling towers. Same is true of any coal, petroleum, gas, or biomass fired steam boiler. So, to be clear, if you have to overhaul the turbine(s) on your gas fired plant, it's going to be down for a couple of months. Refueling a reactor takes a couple of weeks, a significant chunk of which is waiting for the core to cool off due to decay heat, and bringing the core safely back up to operating temperature afterwards. Uh, uninhabitable for thousands of years? I think you're exaggerating a bit.
How do you stop the next Fukashima from happening?
Its simple. Don't put a plant that is not designed to operate underwater in a location where it can be hit by a tsunami. Its not about safety margin. They designed for earthquakes and there was plenty of safety margin. They did not design them to be suddenly deluged, add all the margin you want and it won't matter.
Its funny how you fail to mention the lower cost, faster construction of many plants by the Chinese and Koreans. You just pick a few worst case first of a kind builds.
These are bargain prices, Mortimer!
You stop the next Fukushima by learning from the past. Don't put your emergency generators in a place where they can be underwater.
There, I fixed it.
No, this is the wrong answer. Nuclear plants are designed to withstand credible external events. You don't place a plant where it will experiences a credible event it is not designed for. When you design a nuclear plant to withstand an external hazard, you design it so that ALL of the safety systems are functional before, during and after the event, not just the emergency generators. Nuclear plants typically are designed for flooding up to a given level of their structures, you don't place them where flooding can exceed that level which is exactly what happened, made worse by the destructive force of the tsunami (which is actually a different event altogether than simple flooding as it also comes with destructive force). They never should have placed the Fukushima plants where they could have been hit by a tsunami.
Most of the rebuild happen due to changes in design between the module being constructed and assembly on site. Who the hell subtracts the consideration of a bolt being in the way between the plan for the module when the marrying module been already placed? Why not make work packages cumulative, just showing the changes made in rev 1, rev 2, etc... not considering that some poor craft has to figure out what the hell to build? But hey, that is the Westinghouse way. How can you meet INPO principle 7 - Build as designed, if you are not designing it.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Solar power...in Finland?
Going to be a few years before that is economic. But Finland is an edge case...edge if the Arctic ocean.
Just hand bottles of vodka in front of treadmills and let the citizens generate the power.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How do you define what corner cutting is? Nuclear always has some non-zero risk. We can make it extremely unlikely, but that costs money. So you want the power plant operator to operate at break-even or even profit loss before you are satisfied?
Toshiba was utterly foolish to make this purchase without considering the fact that nuclear power plants are inexorably more expensive...
You do realise this isn't Toshiba the manufacturer of your DVD player but Toshiba the parent of Westinghouse the worlds second largest nuclear construction and engineering form and the worlds largest nuclear operator and service supplier right?
I'm sure they have no idea about the economics of the nuclear industry and they are lucky to have your incredible vision to guide them.
investing in reactor construction in the US seems like a very expensive and extremely risky proposition
They didn't invest, they bought out a competitor. Toshiba is already the largest operator and service supplier and second largest engineering and construction company in the nuclear industry. (Google Westinghouse Nuclear)
Toshiba is still in business? What business are they in? I've not seen a Toshiba product in the past decade.
So you want the power plant operator to operate at break-even or even profit loss before you are satisfied?
I think it's rather obvious. They don't want the plant to operate at all. The concern over safety is just the pretext. Making nuclear plants too expensive to operate is the end goal.
Just hand bottles of vodka in front of treadmills and let the citizens generate the power.
Drunken Rage Against the Machine?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
WhooPPSS! I see what you did there!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Yes, it is expensive, but once built the plant can run for 80 to 100 years and pay for itself many times over.
No. When you consider the interest payments on the capital investment, and the amortized cost of decommissioning, nuclear is not competitive with shale gas, and cannot operate without subsidies. Nuclear is no longer even competitive with wind. 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.
The engineering lesson learned is to not place the plant where it can be deluged by a Tsunami. If you want to count on a wall for that, you'd better get it high enough.
So why is the lesson move the plant rather than the more obvious build a higher wall that actually covers reasonable risks that the location has seen over appropriate time scales?
Every location with have something wrong with it.
They stopped their entire direct resale and direct consumer sales program and their C50-55 satellite computers are absolute garbage. Like on par with HP garbage. Those are the real 2 reasons they're tanking right now.
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?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
How do you stop the next Fukashima from happening?
First by understanding what went wrong. The reactor survived the tsunami, shutdown successfully from an automated system that detected the seismic activity. So, nothing in the reactor itself failed. What failed was the systems designed to dissipate the heat from the short lived fission products. At least one of the failed reactors was near the end of a fuel cycle and so it had a very large proportion of fission products in the fuel, meaning the core was going to get dangerously hot if cooling stopped. Without fission occurring only the thermal capacity of the fuel kept the pumps running, once it cooled down the head of steam was lost. Once steam pressure is lost the system could not be restarted, I'm not sure why.
Without power to run the cooling pumps the water in the reactor started to get hot, then boil. For reasons of neutron efficiency the fuel is contained by a zirconium alloy. Zirconium, when hot enough, will burn in water. This burning water and zirconium releases hydrogen gas. There are systems to recombine the hydrogen to water but they were not working due to lost power. Either out of a concern for releasing the potentially radioactive hydrogen gas to the air, or a failure of the systems to vent to air, the hydrogen gas was allowed to accumulate in the building. The buildup continued until it reached an explosive level, and then exploded. This further damaged the structure, cooling systems, and containment.
When hot enough to melt zirconium and steel the fuel can lose containment, pile up on the bottom of the vessel, and fission can restart. This makes it hotter. Adding water can moderate the neutrons making the fission rate, and therefore heat production, increase. Not adding water can mean leaving hot volatile metals exposed to the atmosphere where it can be spread by the heated air. Adding water can also fuel more zirconium fires and create another explosion hazard. Not adding water means this hot mess of a core will melt through the concrete. If there is not enough concrete to melt and mix with the fuel to stop the fission it will melt until it hits the water table, the water will flash boil, and fission will stop, by ejecting this mix of fuel, fission products, burning zirconium, and boiling concrete into the air.
So, how do we keep this from happening? Use a moderator other than water. Use a coolant other than water. Use containment structures built out of something other than zirconium and steel. Don't allow fission products to build up. Dissipate the heat in a way that does not rely on pumps.
Use a graphite moderator. Use a salt coolant. Use containment made of a nickel alloy. Separate out the fission products while the reactor is operating. Build the cooling such that if anything goes wrong that air convection can keep it cool.
Where do we find this "magical" reactor? It's called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR. Look it up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
First you should distinguish the plant from the siting characteristics. GE designed the plant, not the site. GE will tell you plants of that design are not intended to withstand such a tsunami. They will show how they can withstand earthquakes of a given magnitude (with margin), tornadoes and tornadoes missiles (with margin), etc, but NOT tsunamis that suddenly deluge the plant with destructive force. It is the responsibility of the licensee to put the plant where it cannot experience such an event, or in other words they must determine that event is not credible at the location.
You're still doing it. Really what is so hard to grasp about a sea wall high enough to prevent a 1 in 500 year event, which incidentally would prevent the 2011 accident? Why are we to blame site location? It's irrational.
Clearly the wall did not make the event non-credible. Even a higher wall might not.
Actually, yes, it does because it shows that they were designing the defenses of the plant for large tsunami. That means, in your lingo, that the tsunami event is credible.
Nuclear plant safety systems are built with layers of protection and redundancy against design basis events. A single wall, even if high enough, does not meet that criteria. Done properly there would need to be assurance that the plant would remain safe even with a wall failure.
Now, we're moving the goal posts. Even if we were to take your concern seriously, there are several additional ways to provide that redundancy and the Fukushima plant used at least one of them (emergency generators).
Let me help you with these parts.
The reactors that were in service there all suffered from design flaws, referred to as a 'Design Basis Issues'. They work around these issues by have operational and implementation processes so that suffering an accident from that flaw can be avoided. This requires strict adherence to the manufactuer and implementing the support systems the reactor requires.
In the case of the Fukushima reactors the American Society of Mechanical Engineers found two flaws, the pressure vessel itself leaked above 70psi and the gate pair seal for the spent fuel cooling pools would start to leak.
The reactor was rated to the ground acceleration it experienced. At issue was that TEPCO did not adhere to the recommendations for operating these reactors that *must* always have power supplied to them so as not to expose these issues.
Loss of power to the backup cooling would initiate these events because a loss of cooling (Accident) would cause the reactor core to heat and begin to produce hydrogen. The pressure would build and thus the reactor start to leak hydrogen above 70 psi. The same thing would happen in the cooling pool because of the leaking gate pair seals, with less water to cool the spent fuel, they too started heat, boil and produce hydrogen outside of the reactor.
When the moderator is gone and the fuel rods get thermally and radioactively hot it initiates a thing called a 'plutonium fire'. This was the main motivation for emptying the unit 4 pool as it was unstable and its foundations had sunk an additional 30 inches into the ground. Fortunately this has recently been completed.
Let us call this what it is: a 'meltdown'.
We should be concerning ourselves how to ensure improvements to the existing Nuclear Industry are implemented. We have seen examples of the professionals in organizations like the NRC who can indentify and design improvements that manifest in regulation however, as we can see in the official report, TEPCO colluded to *prevent* these improvements from occurring.
Some of TEPCO's board has been charged with negligence because of the criminal negligence of the board of TEPCO. They colluded with the regulator and put everyone's safety at risk. It makes me think of that story about the guy putting the cruise control on the Winnebago and then stepping into the back to make himself a coffee just before the vehicle drove itself off an embankment. It's a close analogy the only difference is that TEPCO understood what the risks were. They read the owners manual, so to speak, they didn't want to spend the money because they believed it wasn't required.
At issue is if human beings are able to operate them safely. Chernobyl and Fukushima both failed because of how they were being managed and it is these types of organizational failures that have caused these disasters. The hubris of the operators caused the destruction of the communities that surround them.
No matter what reactor technology is being used it seems we haven't been able to avoid this characteristic of human nature as Fukushima shows that the nuclear industry learned nothing from Chernobyl.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Do you think that maybe, possibly, perhaps the costs of nuclear power has gone up because we've stopped building them for 40 years?
Why does that matter? If they are uneconomic, they are uneconomic. The reasons are irrelevant. Do you really believe that we should squander money subsidizing nukes because that is the "fair" thing to do? Fair to whom?
What point do you think you're making, dipshit? You're basically demonstrating you can't face the comment so you have to derp about something irrelevant. If you're going to talk about "forever ever", then nothing makes a difference, it's all the heat death of the universe. So kill yourself already and stop stinking up the place.
I described the fundamental principals of nuclear safety which you seem to want to ignore.
You should too. That's why, for example, Fukushima received prior to the earthquake a significant extension on life despite because an older, less safe design. Those same "principles" prevented newer, safer nuclear plants from being constructed (a whole generation of Japanese nuclear plants in design or under construction were wiped out in 1995-2005) while requiring older plants to continue operating beyond their design lifespan. Similarly, those "principles" delayed reevaluation of the tsunami threat when new research was published in 2001.
Second, actual risk analysis should be done including learning from the past. Here, it's worth noting that Fukushima had followed the very principles you claim are fundamental including at least two back up systems for tsunami (three actually, counting your hardening buildings as a system). And at the time the plant was constructed, Fukushima would have withstood a 1 in 100 year tsunami event and earthquake.
But it the end, this particular plant was not designed to withstand a tsunami.
Which remains bullshit. It was designed to withstand some pretty high tsunami (about 5 meters), but not one this high (as high as 15 meters). Please recall that a number of nuclear plants did withstand this particular tsunami and there were no other cases of partial inundation. So we know that nuclear plants can both be designed to withstand tsunami and succeed at that task.
Yes, a higher wall preventing the tsunami from hitting the plant could have averted things, and yes, higher generators could have helped in the response, but that doesn't mean either is good enough.
Either solution in isolation would have prevented all of the melt downs, long term mass evacuations, and clean up costs that are somewhere north of $10 billion. Saying that the stark difference between a non-accident and multiple reactor meltdowns isn't "good enough" shows the utter bankruptcy and absurdity of your position.
No, the wall was designed to stop 5 meter tsunamis from hitting the plant, the reason was that the plant was not capable of withstanding it. Why is that so hard to understand?
Because it's an inane point to make. The seawall is part of the plant.
And I never said "the stark difference between a non-accident and multiple reactor meltdowns isn't "good enough"",
You should have written something else then.
No, the seawall is not part of the plant. The plant was designed by GE and there was no sea wall in the design.
There is confusion here that shouldn't be. The nuclear plant is the overall local system, not merely the reactors themselves. So it naturally includes things like a seawall. The seawall is on plant property and solely present to further the needs of the plant. That makes it just as much a part of the plant as other routine elements like an access road, security fence, or grid access which aren't part of the reactor structures themselves.
Further, GE designed the reactors and as I recall oversaw construction of them. But the plant was designed by TEPCO (including of course, the seawall). You will find a number of stories that are quite clear on this design responsibility distinction.
I should not have written what I never wrote? OK.
The quote in question:
Yes, a higher wall preventing the tsunami from hitting the plant could have averted things, and yes, higher generators could have helped in the response, but that doesn't mean either is good enough.
That sentence speaks for itself. Sure, these fairly simple changes could have completely eliminated the accident and its huge consequences, "but that doesn't mean either is good enough". Write something different, if you don't want to be accused of dismissing the difference between a huge accident and a non-accident as not "good enough".
All I've heard about nuclear so far is that it typically repays the cost to build it in 5 years. Which rather curiously is about as long as it takes to build a reactor.
There are more arguments for nuclear depending on where you are. Energy independence can be one. The fuel market is a lot less volatile than the oil market and it's trivial to stockpile fuel.
Did you bother reading the article? The chart title is "Fuel Prices in Heat Production".
http://www.stat.fi/til/ehi/201...
Do you even know the difference between MWt and MWe?
A CANDU reactor can be refueled without being put offline.
First you should distinguish the plant from the siting characteristics. GE designed the plant, not the site. GE will tell you plants of that design are not intended to withstand such a tsunami.
Here's what I think is particularly inane about this argument:
1) If a "credible" risk isn't explicitly anticipated in the plant design or ruled out by "siting characteristics", then the plant shouldn't be built there.
2) You decide a seawall is neither part of a plant design nor a siting characteristic and thus, can be outright ignored.
3) Thus, a plant shouldn't be built anywhere a seawall would be required.
The obvious problem with this chain of argument is that a good seawall can greatly reduce the risk of putting a nuclear plant on the coast (which incidentally is one of the best places in the world to put nuclear plants) so that it has comparable flooding risk to any other water-side location. And it does that, no matter how you choose to classify seawalls.
So your argument is a huge fallacy of semantics with sole dependence on your classification of seawalls as something you can ignore. You can see the effects of the fallacy if you were to reclassify seawalls as part of the plant rather than not. It doesn't change the operation of the plant, its risks, or any real world stuff. But suddenly, the site of the nuclear plant goes from inappropriate to appropriate.
A trivial semantics shift like this should not result in a non-trivial change in the outcome of the argument. That is how we can see that this is a fallacy of semantics.
Had they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami instead of depending on a wall to prevent one from hitting the plant,
Not even wrong. The wall was how they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami. The emergency generators were the backup.
Unless you have high enough confidence that you know a wall height that will cover any future tsunami
I don't have to. "Credible events" remember? We're not speaking of nearby asteroid impacts or other sources of vastly bigger tsunami which might have frequencies of once every few million years. There's a limit to how big the tsunami that an earthquake can generate.
and have considered every possible failure of that wall to function properly
Same.
OK, if YOU want to play semantics and make the wall part of the "plant", then you must describe the event and the design for the event appropriately. In this case, the event is a massive tsunami breaching the wall. The design basis of the plant did not consider a massive tsunami breach of the wall a credible event. The "reactor building and associated structures" were not properly designed to handle this event. The entire "plant" was sited in place where this event could happen.
The massive tsunami didn't breach the wall, it overtopped it. Words have meaning.
And since the designers didn't consider overtopping the seawall to be a credible event, then by your logic, why should they design for it?
Had the entire plant properly considered the event, and designed for it using common nuclear safety practices, they would have hardened the "reactor and associated structures", flood proofed, raised generators and fuel supplies, added contingency fuel supplies to extend emergency diesel run time to account for lack of accessibility, added sealed doors in other locations and procedural requirements to keep flood doors closed, and a ton of other things. Then THAT would have resulted in certainly of not only nuclear safety but also generally saving the asset from tremendous remediation costs. That would have been quite acceptable.
And that's something that we can do now that we know that overtopping is a problem. That's the difference between learning from experience and merely deciding never to do something at a location because something preventable happened there.
I was reading the links you provided colordev, however the ft link is paywalled. Do you have another link or a paste so I can read it please?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.