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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.
They make stuff relevant to slashdotters, and their future is therefore also relevant. How is your whining relevant?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Westinghouse AP-1000. A 'new', safe(r) plant that was supposed to be the savior of the nuclear power industry. Unfortunately, it's still to complicated and expensive for anybody to put together on any sort of economical basis. Toshiba holds a majority stake in Westinghouse.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nuclear was making a big comeback till Fukushima happened.
Renewable isn't all that great, though. It can't draw enough power. I bet nuclear makes another comeback, but probably not soon enough for Toshiba.
Exactly this. I had a guy straight up trade me a Voodoo 5 for my GeForce with hardware T&L in college. We met playing a Q3 match and found out we were on the same campus. I still feel i got the better end of the trade, the V5 was great at anti-aliasing, but he needed the hardware T&L feature.
Good-bye
What do short termers have to do with this? First, the company really screwed up last year. I doubt they have many willing long term investors left. Scandals like that hit long time supporters the most.
But that scandal is what is messing with them now. It's a pretty bad confidence hit to their accounting practices to mess up like that. This just makes it far worse. That lack of accounting & transparency confidence severely limits your investor pool. It rules out those big ticket govt backed entities like 401k funds.
And because of the screw up, they're barred from issuing more stock. Even though it's 4+ billion, for a company this size, that is easily solved by stock. But they don't have that option now. BTW, short term investors are the ones which would have bought up that stock issuance.
Or, you could just upgrade the transmission infrastructure like you need to anyway. That way when it's sunny in Las Vegas and cloudy in Seattle you can move those electrons around.
It's also likely that storage technologies will improve enough to where nuclear really isn't needed. It's a useful technology and if we had handled it correctly, would probably account for baseload for a number of generations. But we screwed it up (we being pretty much the entire human race) and it is anything but clear that it will be viable in the next 20-40 years.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Having "6 transistors" was a selling point back then, apparently, because I remember it well. It was a pocket radio, white and brown, with a big dial for the AM band and small one for the volume. Had an ear phone, which I used to talkbox way before Frampton. He must have seen me. It would be a sad day in Mudville if it went the way of the doodoo.
You can transmit power from LA to San Francisco, and that does help. Keep in mind the idea, for many people at least, is to switch to clean *energy*. Meaning getting rid of gasoline, diesel, heating oil, the tons of coal used in industrial furnaces, etc. You don't need to generate the same electricity as all of today's power plants, you need at least four to eight times as much electricity, if you want to get rid of diesel etc. It's an enormous amount of power.
Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks "about half as bright" to our eyes is actually about 15% as bright, in terms of luminous power. A sunny day is about 120,000lux, a cloudy day about 1,000lux. Meaning when it's cloudy, the sun's power is reduced by over 99%. When the western half of the US is covered in clouds (and much of it was covered just last week), there's no way you're going to have enough solar power to provide our energy needs. We can't reasonably provide even our current *electricity* needs, and currently electricity is a small portion of our *power*.
> It's also likely that storage technologies will improve enough
People sure are trying, because storing even a few hours worth of power, to use afternon power to cook dinner, is very valuable. Yet, to store two days of power using pumped storage we'd have to flood 2/3rds of the United States. Barring a revolution in physics akin to nuclear power or something else as revolutionary as quantum physics, we're bot going to be able to store enough power to run California for a few days. It may happen 150 years from now, but no time soon.
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.
> But for a place like Denmark, wind power alone can sometimes supply more electricity than the country's *entire* demand
Denmark imports trash to burn in order to heat houses. At it's peak, on a day with perfect winds, their renewables can provide the ELECTRICITY for a few hours, while they are burning coal and trash for heat, diesel and gasoline for transportation. Normally, wind provides about 5% of their energy, due to a nasty problem called the cube law (more on that later).
Even if you ignore the trash burning heating plants and focus only on electricy, coal power provides 48.0% of Denmark's *electricity*.
Wind is really awesome in some ways, seriously. It's great when the wind is great, but the cube law is a motherfucker. The power of wind is proportional the velocity CUBED. Suppose a windmill is designed to work in winds up to 40 MPH wind. 40^3 is 64,000, so the structure is absorbing 64,000 units of power without damage. When the wind is 10 MPH, the power is 1,000; 99% less. In a structure designed for 64,000 power, 1% of the energy will be lost in big beefy bearings, etc. At 10 MPH, 1% is most of the power available - a 10 MPH wind barely overcomes friction and there's no substantial power generated. The cube law is a bitch, but it's fundamental physics.
That's not to say wind power shouldn't be used! It's great when the wind is right and you can throttle down the natural gas power plants.
> Why not use molten salt for power storage?
It IS used. Solana, a major solar plant, uses molten salt. It provides up to six hours of storage (though some energy is lost during that time) and helps the plant to generate about 38 percent of its rated capacity each year. As I said, the storage we have today (and will likely have in the next 50 years) is great for using afternoon power to cook dinner in the evening, a few hours later. That's really important. It could double the amount of solar we can use, up to 2% pf our energy from the current 1%.
Note that molten salt is used by concentrating solar power plants, NOT systems using solar-electric panels. Molten salt is for when you can create very high temperatures very efficiently. Wave power doesn't fit that description either, of course.
As mentioned, molten salt allows a plant to provide *some* of an area's *electricity* needs for a few hours. We need to provide *all* of California's *energy* needs for several days. Sometimes it's cloudy for a week. A cloudy day is about 1,000 lux, a sunny day 115,000 lux. In other words, on cloudy days your concentrated solar power plant isn't producing any significant power. Yet people will continue to drive when it's cloudy for a week, so if you want to replace diesel trucks with electric, solar isn't going to do the job - a few hours of molten salt doesn't nearly get you there.
Cost of nuclear is out of control everywhere. Ever checked out, say, the Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant? In what way is the many-billion-euro overrun / decade-late reactor due to "red tape"? The answer is "virtually nothing". And it's the same story everywhere.
Beyond that, the last thing you want when dealing with nuclear is underregulation. Nuclear disasters aren't particularly deadly, but they're massively expensive. They're disasters in slow motion, like an advancing lava flow - you can run from it, but you can't ignore it. You think that billions of dollars to build a plant is expensive, check out the cost of cleaning up Fukushima. And that's hardly the worst case scenario. Imagine the cost of a Fukushima-scale disaster at, say, Indian Point. And please, no stupid "but there couldn't be a tsunami there" remarks, as if that is the only way in which a disaster can occur; unless you were out there saying "nuclear is safe except for in major tsunamis" before Fukushima, you have no grounds to consider yourself prophetic in what may or may not cause major disasters. The whole reason disasters happen at all is because people thought they couldn't - otherwise they would have taken the necessary steps to prevent them. Regulation of nuclear is rational. And IMHO in practice generally far too favorable to operators rather than the public.
Nuclear would be great if it wasn't absurdly expensive. It is. And it's not some "red tape" / NIMBY boogieman that makes it so. It's suffered from a negative learning curve over the years - the more we've learned, the more expensive it's gotten, not less. It's like buying a house and then discovering that there's termites in the walls and the foundation is cracked - only on the scale of an entire industry. The industry's solution was to try to launch a new generation of reactors to try to get the costs down. This much hyped "nuclear renaissance" sounded great but rapidly descended into an even worse financial quagmire.
To make it worse, nuclear is about the worst thing you can pair with the surge in now-super-cheap but still intermittent renewables. Nuclear's poor economics are already taking into account its high capacity factor. If you try to use it as peaking (which most plants aren't even capable of), you inherently greatly lower its capacity factor - and by doing that, you proportionally worsen its economics. If you go from a 90% capacity factor to a 30% one, it's as if your plant cost 3x as much to build. For peaking you use plants that are cheap to build but expensive to operate, not the other way around.
Most existing nuclear power plants will continue to operate for a good while. But there's little prospect of new nuclear plants filling in a relevant portion of new generation demand. Even if the economic picture radically changes, there won't be a sudden reversal, because nuclear plants take so long to build. It's yet another flaw - you have to forecast the energy market where you are (not just the total demand, but the type of supply needed) a decade or more in advance. And if you're talking plants that wouldn't come online until 2-3 decades from now (a decade or two for trends to shift, plus another decade for construction), you could well be competing against fusion, so long as ITER and DEMO aren't cut (the trends in that seem to be moving in the right direction, with improvements in magnets meaning you can get the same level of confinement from a smaller, cheaper plant). When you're talking so far into the future, who knows? Who in the 80/early 90s would have predicted wind and solar would cost only $1/W today?
For the foreseeable future, new demand will be predominantly filled by solar, wind and natural gas.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?