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Delays, Confusion as Toshiba Reports $6 Billion Nuclear Hit and Slides To Loss (reuters.com)
Makiko Yamazaki, reporting for Reuters: After a day of delays and confusion, Japan's Toshiba said on Tuesday it expected to book a $6.3 billion hit to its U.S. nuclear unit, a writedown that wipes out its shareholder equity and will drag the group to a full-year loss. Hours earlier on Tuesday, the battered conglomerate rattled investors by failing to release its earnings on schedule, saying initially it was 'not ready' and then announcing later it needed more time to probe its Westinghouse nuclear business after internal reports uncovered potential problems. The figures eventually released were numbers that have yet to be approved by its auditor and Toshiba cautioned investors that a major revision was possible. Fully audited numbers are now not due till March 14 after the firm was granted a reprieve for its formal filing by Japanese regulators. "Finally now people are starting to recognize that internal control problems, the accounting issues and governance issues are very real and no longer abstract," said Zuhair Khan, an analyst at Jefferies in Tokyo. "They impact the viability of the company."
Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget. A half ass commitment will fail for any large project, be it nuclear or other.
appears there was horrid due diligence all the way down the line when Toshiba decided to go for the Westinghouse nuke business as Westinghouse shed its skin to become CBS. and then one bad addition after another. shame.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Shares in the group slid 8 percent, putting the company's market value at 973 billion yen ($8.6 billion), less than half its value in mid-December. Just under a decade ago, the firm was worth almost 5 trillion yen.
Lost over 80% of it's market value in ten years. Sounds like Toshiba has other problems besides this.
As I've posted before, Fuck Toshiba and the [generic beast of burden] they rode in on. They have by far the worst consumer customer service I've ever run across.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Still no place to bury the fuel rods, it's going to keep costing to contain them for many more decades.
Nuclear isn't expensive or dangerous. Western governments are expensive and dangerous, and have pumped billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by prohibiting nuclear construction. Western governments have made nuclear more dangerous by prohibiting construction and leaving us with older, less safe designs. Western governments have made nuclear too expensive by allowing indefinite, arbitrary delays by every court within a thousand miles, by every NIMBY asshole who whines. Nuclear isn't subsidized; in fact, it's the only power generation, at all, that's pre-funding cleanup. Stop lying.
Wind and solar are getting to the point where they'll be cheaper than coal (without subsidies). Nuclear is the most expensive.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'll assume you meant gasoline and natural gas. Although I admit my knowledge is limited when it comes to countries which use 'petrol'.
Then subsidize them: if it works like with mass-transit it would be a win given that subsidizing mass-transit is a *very* effective policy.
Kind of like investing in Solyndra.
Well, that's why the Department of Energy provided loan guarantees for a diversity of enterprises.
And it's in the black so, yay?
Point to a single credible levelized cost per MWh analysis that shows this. Solar and wind are still quite expensive on average, even when you don't factor in the cost if intermittency management.
both melted down this weekend. Good. Never buy a toshiba hard drive, any overheating and they cook faster than a radiated cockroach during a thermonuclear holocaust. That and their warranty sucks nuts too.
Hope they all burn, now give me my damn RMA
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Encase in ceramic, drop into a deep subduction zone. Earth will recycle them over the next million years.
I'm planning on getting the next iPhone and dont want anything to delay it.
Wind and solar are getting to the point where they'll be cheaper than coal (without subsidies). Nuclear is the most expensive.
That's not correct. Not with gas so cheap due to fracking.
Solar has higher maintenance costs than the solar guys want to admit. Wind has issues with capacity, NIMBY issues, and environmental concerns with bird migrations. Because no utility scale power storage works anywhere (Powerwalls won't cut it), both have problems with generating electricity to meet demand, which power generation must meet on a minute by minute basis. And no, the fully capitalized cost of wind and solar are still way above the fully capitalized cost of natural gas.
Nuclear is the cheapest even fully capitalized if run at capacity and efficiently, but nuclear has trouble scaling costs and generation to demand too; it basically has to be run at full capacity all the time to be effective.
No, there is no alternative energy that is even remotely economical for a full replacement of fossil fuels. Most people try to play off solar and wind as economical, but those are modeled costs, not real costs which has to factor in utilization rates and down time relative to demand. Fossil fuel plants are cheap to make, gas is cheap and will continue to be as fracking continues, and easily scale generation to the demands of the grid. Until there is a major breakthrough allowing utility scale power storage, no alternative method of power generation will compete or be economical.
Which is why Jimmy Carter's executive order to halt recycling was so stupid. Hopefully that will be reversed soon.
So, responsible governments allow reprocessing, and consequently have this problem figured out. Yucca mountain is a problem caused by Jimmy Carter's ignorant, foolish decision to prohibit reprocessing fuel rods. Almost all of the scary radioactive elements in a first run fuel rod are sources of energy that we're throwing away right now, and plan to bury, instead of doing the environmentally and fiscally responsible thing and reprocessing them.
WTF!
buidling a nuclear plant is a HUGE investment... true that it have a long life...but you are just another one that thinks that nuclear waste do not cost any money and somebody else problem. For you and anybody that think like this, you and your family (and all future childrends) should move next to a nuclear waste storage and not leave for thousand of years
Higuita
I've been hearing that for two decades now. It still isn't true.
Has solar reached the point where nuclear isn't necessary? I realize that storage is still a big issue but on such a large scale, it would seem there would be a number of solutions for this other than traditional battery storage and maybe it makes more sense to have largely independent homes or subdivisions each with their own storage than single unit large scale power plants going forward. As bullish as I used to feel about nuclear, it just seems passé these days.
Just continue screwing over the people of New Mexico. Problem solved.
I'm by no means an expert but recent media has made this seem to be the case. Comparison image
jokes on your great great great grandchildren then as my great great great grandchildren will be atomic supermen by then!
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Wind works as a diverse source across a wide region. For it to work well at scale in the US, you would need to connect the east coast and west coast electrical grids, although there are plenty of things you can do at smaller scale. The PowerWall doesn't work at the windmill, but it works as a bridge between grid peaks in generation and utilization. Natural gas and hydro can do the same thing, depending on where the choke points are.
Reading comprehension fail?
Cheap coal is stealing clean air from the commons, by polluting it and not paying the true costs of their pollution.
Germany has a net value in export of energy to France (and in total revenues). There's no build of standalone renewables because the price of nuclear is subsidised so that France et al can sell at dumping costs when they're overproducing, depressing the price and making renewable replacement pointless and negatively profitable.
So, your claim isn't "funny", it's just alternative to reality.
Because reality doesn't fucking matter to you ignorant pricks.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/03/1416222/solar-could-beat-coal-to-become-the-cheapest-power-on-earth-in-less-than-a-decade
"it basically has to be run at full capacity all the time to be effective."
sorry sir, that's old technology you are referencing. gen IV nuclear plants are impressive, and their on the cusp of deployment.
Surely you must joking. Or your country is completely different than mine (Slovakia).
I pay about 0.3 per kWh of electricity as a subsidy for nuclear power.
I also pay about 2.6 per kWh of electricity as a "system fee". Most of the "system fee" is subsidy for renewables - especially solar power.
Notice that the fee is computed from all the electricity I consume. My country generates about half of the electricity from nuclear. Solar power is somewhere around 1%. The result is that solar power is many many times more subsidized than nuclear here.
Because that ceramic won't rupture prematurely because ... magic I guess. I agree on the general concept, but the engineering (physical and chemical) to make this happen simply hasn't been done.
Your image showed the most expensive nuclear as cheaper than the cheapest residential solar. Utility-scale solar was comparable to, or cheaper than, nuclear, but that didn't include the required back-up power (your utility-scale unit is just as susceptible to clouds as your home system, which requires a backup)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
True, but only because wind and solar now ARE cheaper than coal (*), if you compare new generation, i.e. building a new plant.
* Of course, this depends on your location.
That's not a fair comparison, as the data is poisoned by the EPA refusing all permits to build or repair any coal powered plant for the last 4 years. There was a war on coal, and it wasn't fracking, but the EPA that won it.
Believe it or not, a lot has changed in 20 years.
To get you up to date, here's a good article (with real data) showing solar and wind are cheaper than coal and nuclear:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...
Short version for the click impaired: $Cost per MWh: Wind $32, Solar $39, Coal $60, Nuclear $97
These are unsubsidized prices for wind and solar... coal and nuclear are the subsidized prices and do not include the cost of external damage.
"A study led by the former head of the Harvard Medical School found that coal cost the US $500 billion per year in extra health and environmental costs — approximately 9/kWh ($90/MWh) to 27/kWh ($270/MWh) more than the price we pay directly. To fool yourself into thinking these are not real costs is to assume that cancer, heart disease, asthma, and early death are not real.
The air, water, and climate effects of natural gas are not pretty either. On the nuclear front, the decommissioning and insurance costs of nuclear power — unaccounted for above — would also put nuclear off the chart."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
If you don't count the cost of building the plant, solar and wind beat everything hands down since they don't have any ongoing fuel cost and only minimal maintenance cost.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
In reality they have just crossed another milestone: they are cheaper when they are generating. That will do for now while there is substantial fossil capacity to back them up, but if we are to phase out fossil fuels entirely the figure you have to compare nuclear to is generation plus storage.
The cheapest by far is pumped storage. In countries with plenty of hydro it's effectively free. For the rest of us it's about $1/watt generation capacity. Nuclear comes in at $8/watt or so. Wind comes in at $4/watt and solar is hitting parity with that, so even with storage renewables are cheaper. Nuclear is already history.
An argument I often see here is there are no sites available for pumped storage. Turns out that's wrong. Here in Australia (which is mostly flat desert) we did a survey recently. You need is a hill where you build a dam about 500m in diameter, that has a valley about 400m below within 3km or so. Turns out the country is littered with literally 10's of thousands of sites like this.
None of this is free of course - you still have to spend the $5/watt or so. Australia's energy consumption is 50GW, so that totals AU$250 Billion. That's a metric fuck ton of money to a small country like Australia. But as it happens out coal generation facilities are near retirement, so we would have to spend it anyway.
No reading comprehension fail. You're just a fucking idiot. The switch from wood heat to coal fired electric heat reduced residential pollution 3 orders of magnitude. That in itself made life a hell of a lot better, not worse, for the commons.
Since the war on coal began, the standard of living in the world has stopped increasing. This war on coal is killing more people with poverty than it is saving by preventing pollution. You don't want to hear it so you're not going to listen.
No, fucktard, I made no such suggestion. In fact, I specifically stated that it's the only power generation, at all, that's pre-funding cleanup..
However, being marginally literate, I'm aware that a mile of rock will protect me from all affects of buried nuclear waste. In fact, the most dangerous radiation, the alpha, is stopped by a sheet of paper, and the beta radiation is stopped by an inch of steel. Gamma and neutron radiation can penetrate a few feet of concrete, but not a mile of rock.
But, more importantly, we should be recycling the fuel rods, because the radiation you're ignorantly terrified of is energy that we're throwing away instead of using. Recycling fuel rods is a solved problem; the responsible European governments already do that, while our retarded hero, Jimmy Carter, banned it.
And while I agree that building a nuclear plant is a big investment, you must admit that 2/3 of the cost of a nuclear plant is in legal fees and interest accumulated due entirely to obstruction in the courts and regulatory agencies. That 2/3 doesn't include any regulatory compliance, just dealing with obstructionism.
In short, you're so full of shit that it's crapping out your mouth and typing.
As this is the USA, to profit is easy, just get the money from the government!
example, start a company in "green" energy like solar. get the secretary of energy to endorse your company for guaranteed DOE loans worth $535M. Burn through the money in a year. confide to the president that you are out of cash and ask them to help you do another fundraising round of $75M. Burn through that money in 6 months and layoff all your staff...
Just don't forget to give the president lots of credit and you will for sure be praised as a great business! :D
People often complain that wind and solar are intermittent whereas nuclear is 100% all the time (as is most coal electricity production).
In use, power plants which can't be throttled back for times of low demand are as much a problem as power plants which vary their output during the day.
You are right that the grid needs storage. It's crazy hard to match supply to demand when your demand changes all the time and your supply doesn't magically follow the demand.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yeah, but they handle that by varying demand. To wit: most of coal here have an aluminium plant pair with them, who get their power for near free. They take the excess supply. It's not a total solution because the price of power here goes negative most nights (ie, the coal power generators PAY others to take their power) - so they are offloading some of it onto the rest of the grid as well. But to me that's fair, as ultimately the coal and nuclear power plants are paying the price for their inability to follow the load by giving away the energy. Currently wind and solar are offloading the cost of not being able to supply when needed to the rest of the grid. Clearly they will have to pay the cost one day - probably by giving their excess power away to pump storage operators, who then get to sell it later.
How we pay for the peak demand pumped storage, which still costs $5/watt but is only used a couple of days a year is an interesting question. But we have the exactly the same issue with transmission lines - we have to pay a huge amount extra to cope with demand imposed by just a few days a year. We managed it, so I guess we will manage it with pumped storage too.
This was posted below:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...
The data is from Lazard Asset Management... a reputable source.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Here is some real data from a financial firm showing wind and solar to be cheaper:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...
Do you have any references for your WAG assertions?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Here's another data point.
The West's largest coal power plant will be shut down decades before the end of it's useful life because it's "too expensive" to operate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
It's not a very good product. That's why Toshiba is loosing money on this business.
The suspended emergency cooling system makes the containment building a heat exchanger and a pressure vessel in case of an emergency. Not that that's a bad idea, however it's an untested design improvement. It's little wonder clients would be wary, with all the terrorism now a days.
Its primary competitor is the EPR reactor whose containment building is double walled and resistant to military attacks, so it's a much tougher product in comparison.
It's a shame that Toshiba's business is affected by this, but if it means no more AP1000s, that's probably not a thing to be too upset about, these are not the only flaws in the design and it doesn't make sense to complain about capitalism when it is working.
EPRs were planned for US deployment last time I looked at the NRCs proposed deployments so perhaps EPR deployments will take over the AP1000s proposed there. The most appealing features I see is that EPR buildings are divided into four functional trains that can assume control of functions of the other buildings, and the control room is detached from the reactor, which mean better survivability for the operators, which means they have a better chance of getting things under control when there is an emergency.
So it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Which would mean we have a choice between "renewables" combined with very dirty coal or somewhat-cleaner-but-still-dirty methane; or going with an all nuclear strategy which would give us large quantities of zero-emissions energy.
But that must, of course, be wrong. It violates the prime directive.
True, both ways generate huge profits for the stock owners and CEO at the cost of the common people.
But all new techs have bubbles and from the thousand of companies that show up, only a few will survive and grow, all others will go bust. Those that invest need to know how to choose and what to choose. Nuclear included
Higuita
it's the only power generation, at all, that's pre-funding cleanup..
LOL!
if you don't even know how much that cleanup will cost, how it is funding it!
they must put some cleanup money now, because later may not be any money for that (company went bust) and the cleanup is REQUIRED due the time scale of the dangers, but you are crazy to think that money will be enough.
Petrol, coal, gas, solar, water, etc may have a "half live" contamination of some years and about 100 years for the structures (maybe a little more for dams). Nuclear is thousand of years... some elements are millions of years. yes, pre-pay that because you will not rise from the dead to pay it later
Rock do not protect you from leaks ->water sheet contamination->food chain.
Also due the time scale, caves can collapse or give alternative open access and spread the radioactive elements
Finally, malicious usage of the waste are also on the table, as again this is a ultimate weapon that can devastate a huge area.
you have to protect this wastes for thousand of years... in containers that were designed to last 100 years (and as we see, are even lasting that long!)
But if it so safe, go live near one of the waste storage.
Recycling the nuclear waste may help, but it is also expensive and still do not solve all the problem, you just get more concentrate and dangerous nuclear waste that you still have to store. Maybe later there is a way to recycle the recycled waste, who knows!
One of the problems of recycling the nuclear waste is that you need to move very dangerous waste all around the countries. Accident may happen and even worse, terrorist attacks
2/3 is legal fees and other shit?! are you high?! there are requirements because this is dangerous, without then companies will sooner or later cut corners. but building a nuclear plan is huge investment due the all things needed, not because legal fees. just check how much it cost to build the protective casing in Chernobyl... there was no legal fees and it is now a full plant
Higuita
Yeah, not like we've had a complete and honest disclosure of the exact state and extent of the issues at Fukushima. Still no control or containment as best I can tell.
The only nuclear business that might make sense is recycling nuclear waste. Eventually, there will be desperate customers. The catch is that it may take a long time for the politicians to figure out there is no other way to get rid of nuclear waste.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us