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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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'
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)
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.