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Toshiba Is 'Burning Cash At An Alarming Rate' (reuters.com)
bsharma quotes a report from Reuters: Faced with the prospect of a multibillion-dollar write-down that could wipe out its shareholders' equity, Japan's Toshiba is running out of fixes: It is burning cash, cannot issue shares, and has few easy assets left to sell. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit. Toshiba says it will be weeks before it can give a final number, but a write-down of the scale expected -- as much as 500 billion yen ($4.3 billion), according to one source close to Toshiba -- would leave the group scrambling to plug the financial hole and keep up hefty investments in the competitive memory chip industry, which generates the bulk of its operating profit. "Toshiba's immediate problem is that it is burning cash at an alarming rate, and this will be more than challenging," said Ken Courtis, chairman of Starfort Investment Holdings. "I see little option but to sell a slew of non-core assets."One source in the semiconductor industry said Toshiba could revive plans to list a slice of the memory chip business, which though highly profitable burns through cash for reinvestment. "Toshiba will probably need to sell 30-40 percent of the NAND business in an IPO to secure enough cash," the source said, adding China's aggressive drive into NAND flash memory chips could make the timing reasonable. The group has already said it could reconsider the "positioning" of its nuclear business, deemed core last year, and has signaled it could trim an 87 percent stake.
Trouble is, nuclear effectively has to pay up front, in terms of higher regulatory and safety requirements, for potential damage that may or may not ever come to be (meltdown) while other forms of energy -- especially coal -- have historically had little or no limitations applied even though they're spewing environmentally and biologically damaging particulates for many, many decades (and that's just the burning -- the mines aren't exactly helping to clean up the planet either.)
Its changing for coal of course nowadays, but they've certainly had a good run of it and other forms of power are still not having to pay for any impacts they may eventually have on the planet.
We're only just beginning to recognize the impacts of wind power (primarily in the form of noise pollution,) and solar panels might be clean energy once manufactured but the manufacturing process has a non-zero impact and so forth. How much of that gets included in the price of a panel and how much is just left as an externality for whoever (or whatever) happens to live near the manufacturing plants?
I'm assuming that even in aggregate, solar and wind are still far cleaner than coal but that doesn't mean that there aren't still hidden costs somewhere along the chain that nobody's paying for (yet) that are acting as an effective but unquantifiable subsidy that nuclear just doesn't get to enjoy. Overall, that just makes it significantly more challenging for nuclear to compete.