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."

Comments

China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no reactors in Russia, China or Korea that are not experiencing significant delays or cost overruns, sorry.

Yours, reality.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[mspohr]

Part of Toshiba's problem is the reactors they are building in China.
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[mspohr]

Except the nuclear reactors that Toshiba is building in China... the usual story... delays, cost overruns.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No, that's not it. Running overbudget is more of a customer problem and is usually caused by customer changes in the middle of construction. It gets settled out between both the customer and the vendor; this is really common in any big build project.

Toshiba's problem is the market for nuclear is in China. China wants to build 70 reactors. Every other country looking at nuclear wants to build maybe 1 or 2 reactors; China is more than half the potential future market. And Westinghouse has no game there, because the CAP1400 which is a majority Chinese owned (and minority owned by Westinghouse) is just a bigger and better AP1000. So they have little play there.

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Check again. South Korea is doing quite well building plants for other countries. Only some of China's are behind schedule. Japan was building plants on schedule as well.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21715685-new-crop-developers-challenging-industry-leaders-how-build-nuclear-power-plant

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[cheesybagel]

The delays in China were basically one-two year delays while all the new reactors being built were reviewed post-Fukushima. It had little to do with construction problems. There is only one reactor family with major construction delays which can be imputable to the design and construction right now and that is EPR.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[cheesybagel]

Yet nuclear is still subsidizing the renewables in Germany and elsewhere last time I looked at it. Funny uh?

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[darkpixel2k]

No, that's not it. Running overbudget is more of a customer problem and is usually caused by customer changes in the middle of construction.

Exactly. It's a customer problem. You originally wanted the walls of the control room painted white. We haven't even started building the control room yet, let alone purchased the paint and you are changing the requirement to 'grey'? That'll obviously cost you 1.6 million in additional fees.

Have you never worked in contracting before?

Roofers quoted me $2,500 to re-shingle my house two years ago. They started the process, then found 4 sheets of OSB that were slightly water damaged and needed to be replaced. So one of them drove to Home Depot and bought 6 sheets of OSB. Total cost for everything with the 4 sheets of OSB (and the 2 'spares')? $8,700.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because nuclear is very expensive. But renewables are LUDICROUSLY expensive :)

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[mspohr]

Your comment doesn't make any sense...
Here's Wikipedia's entry for Germany:
Germany[edit]
"Comparison of the levelized cost of electricity for some newly built renewable and fossil-fuel based power stations in euro per kWh (Germany, 2013)
In November 2013, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE assessed the levelised generation costs for newly built power plants in the German electricity sector.[39] PV systems reached LCOE between 0.078 and 0.142 Euro/kWh in the third quarter of 2013, depending on the type of power plant (ground-mounted utility-scale or small rooftop solar PV) and average German insolation of 1000 to 1200 kWh/m per year (GHI). There are no LCOE-figures available for electricity generated by recently built German nuclear power plants as none have been constructed since the late 1980s."
Wind is cheaper than hard coal in Germany. PV is only a little more expensive in Germany.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Maury Markowitz]

> Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget

Uhh, yeah.

Over the years, Russia has committed to building something like 50 reactors. After Chernobyl, that was reduced to something like 25. They have grand plans for a closed fuel cycle using breeder/burners and reprocessing, and lots of other ideas. So far they've successfully built three. The rest remain hopelessly overdue or completely unfunded. They have decommed as many as they've built since 2000.

China had big plans too, something between 50 and 100 reactors over a 25 to 45 year period. Then the 2008 Sichuan earthquake happened, and they learned that all the construction companies lied and cut corners practically everywhere. The famous school that collapsed only did so because the construction team couldn't be bothered to bend the end of the rebars in the vertical supports, which would have otherwise easily survived. This, needless to say, opened many people's eyes, and the plans have been scaled back to about 25 reactors.

However, these plans are very much in doubt. CNNC based much of its economic arguments on buying up old western designs and then selling them, with Chinese financing, around the world. This did not happen, no one is interested in building nuclear and sales have been rather limited. As a result, the government has been somewhat more interested in renewables, which everyone is buying, and the country has since become the largest installer of wind and solar on the planet. They install more PV in the last five years than the entire planned nuclear buildout.

Nuclear is dead. Siemens, Framitome, AECL, Westinghouse, Toshiba, B&W, BNFL, and on and on and on. The few remaining players are all on life support - GE looks very much like they'll end development with their current generation, Areva only remains alive due to repeated massive French taxpayer infusions, and CNNC's only prospects are local.

You can pretend this isn't true, and many people reply to my messages talking about all these paper plans, but to anyone that's actually worked in the energy industry, the CAPEX > $7.50 is a death knell and everyone knows it.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear shouldn't be a private endeavor e.g. TVA.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Oceanplexian]

Sure, obviously it isn't viable when the government front-loads it with thousands and thousands of regulations to cover the externalities of Nuclear power, when the government does no such thing with Solar or Wind (AKA non-base load generating power). Are they covering the recycling of silicon when they purchase thousands of solar panels? Are they considering the below minimum wage Chinese workers that work in toxic factories to produce your 'green' energy panels? Are they considering the wildlife impact of wiping out hundreds or thousands of square miles to generate a fraction of the energy of a nuclear power plant? The entire system as we know it is a lie, and as they say, turtles all the way down. The only reason things look good on paper is because people have manipulated the numbers for personal benefit.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Humbubba]

Maybe Japan's economic woes were the deciding factor in Toshiba's purchase of the plague-ridden Westinghouse Nuclear Division. But with a "hit" of over 6 billion bucks, the deal was definitely not "clean, safe, too cheap to meter." And with plants throughout Europe, the US and South Korea, I won't be surprised if Toshiba is in for even more trouble.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[cheesybagel]

https://www.dissentmagazine.or...
To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now. Those coal and gas plants will emit large quantities of greenhouse gases even when idling in standby mode. ...
Onshore wind is currently guaranteed at least €89.3 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the first five years of operation, after which the tariff resets to about €49, a little above market rate. Offshore wind will get €150 per MWh for the first twelve years before a downward reset, with long extensions if the facility is located more than twelve miles from shore or where water is at least twenty meters deep. Photovoltaic solar gets roughly €120-180 per MWh, depending on the size of the rig, for a full twenty years. The tariffs are funded by a “renewable energy surcharge” added to electricity bills. A utility will pay a FIT of, say, €180 for a megawatt-hour of solar power; it will then sell that electricity on the wholesale market for perhaps €45 and charge the difference to the renewables surcharge. ...
Even as the Energiewende staggers under exorbitant costs, renewables boosters tout its success in lowering electricity prices. The strange truth is, they’re not wrong. Tides of wind and solar electricity are forcing down prices on European wholesale markets and eroding the profits of conventional plants. French business leaders have complained about the competitive advantage their German rivals get because their renewable power is now cheaper than France’s nuclear electricity.
Is renewable power winning a price war with Big Fossil and Nuclear? Not really. Germany’s feed-in tariffs disguise the fact that intermittent wind and solar power isn’t cheap at all—although it is often worthless. German grid operators are legally required to buy all the electricity wind turbines and solar panels produce, demand or no demand, at prices far above market rates. Having bought it, they then have to get rid of it, because an excess of electricity supply will crash the grid. So they dump it on the wholesale electricity market at bargain-basement rates. Midday solar dumps in sunny weather particularly eat into the profits of conventional plants by pushing down prices during times of elevated demand.
These subsidies and market distortions do not yield a systemic lowering of electricity costs. They are simply transfers from German households that drastically overpay on surcharges to renewable generators—and to electricity-hogging industries that are exempt from surcharges but benefit from lower wholesale electricity prices when wind and solar flood the market.

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[mspohr]

This article is bullshit.
There is no such thing as dispatchable nuclear or coal. These plants are 100% on or off and it takes days or weeks to turn them on.

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[cheesybagel]

Nuclear can be ramped up and down. It's not as fast as a natural gas plant but it can do fast load-follow especially if the load is highly predictable. Even modern coal power plants can do it to a degree and theoretically a coal gasification plant could ramp up and down as quickly as a natural gas power plant.

Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[mspohr]

Nuclear output can only be reduced by a small amount and only slowly. It can't be increased again due to poisoning of the core.
Coal gasification could be dispatchable but the plants, for the most part, don't exist (only 272 worldwide). They also produce a lot of toxic compounds.

Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Found the Westinghouse stockholder.

don't know a business? don't buy it.

[swschrad]

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.

Re: don't know a business? don't buy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like investing in Solyndra.

Re: don't know a business? don't buy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, mr. Accountant, it was all due to lack of diligence. Nothing to do with the unpredictable 2011 quake and the moronic scare of nuclear that followed.

Other problems

[tomhath]

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.

Re:Other problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I see value, buy!

Re:Other problems

[Anonymous Coward]

But... mostly nuclear. Fukushima happened in 2011 right as the rest of the market was picking back up. Toshiba, having lost big in 2009 like every other company on the planet, never recovered. Continued issues in the nuclear arm as well as stiff competition in every other market put too much pressure on them as a whole.

Re:Other problems

[AmiMoJo]

Toshiba has certainly had it's fair share of problems lately, but in this instance it's the nuclear division that is specifically underperforming.

Basically low demand, low profitability, and poor management are to blame.

Re:Other problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to include in all the outright theft and outright bribes in China to keep things going. The Chinese have slowed down the process so that they can copy it, but in the meantime every Tom, Dick,and Wang is taking stuff home to sell.

Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for the world to wise up and pull the plug on this green energy nonsense. None of the various allegedly "green" energy technologies can survive without massive government subsidies, much like mass transit. In a post-fracking world there is no need to tolerate this hippy BS anymore. Stick with cheap, safe petrol and clean coal.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap oil is running out.

Coal isn't cheap as soon as you factor in the true costs of pollution. But as long as you're stealing from the commons and the future of the planet, yes, it does seem petty cheap.

TANSTAAFL

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap coal isn't stealing from the commons; it gave them the biggest increase in standard of living in the history of the world. The war on coal has created the greatest stagnation decrease in standard of living for the commons since the black death.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Still no place to bury the fuel rods, it's going to keep costing to contain them for many more decades.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

Wind and solar are getting to the point where they'll be cheaper than coal (without subsidies). Nuclear is the most expensive.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll assume you meant gasoline and natural gas. Although I admit my knowledge is limited when it comes to countries which use 'petrol'.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[bsolar]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[magarity]

Encase in ceramic, drop into a deep subduction zone. Earth will recycle them over the next million years.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[tomhath]

Which is why Jimmy Carter's executive order to halt recycling was so stupid. Hopefully that will be reversed soon.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[higuita]

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

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[cheesybagel]

I've been hearing that for two decades now. It still isn't true.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[higuita]

another trump puppet... facts are just annoying details, that can be safely ignored, right?!!
every bad things in the world (including wars, diseases and famine) are because we are not burning enough coal...the bible say that somewhere for sure!!!

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[butchersong]

Just continue screwing over the people of New Mexico. Problem solved.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[butchersong]

I'm by no means an expert but recent media has made this seem to be the case. Comparison image

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[networkBoy]

jokes on your great great great grandchildren then as my great great great grandchildren will be atomic supermen by then!

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[aaarrrgggh]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading comprehension fail?

Cheap coal is stealing clean air from the commons, by polluting it and not paying the true costs of their pollution.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[CrimsonAvenger]

I'm by no means an expert but recent media has made this seem to be the case.

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)....

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[olau]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

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."

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[ras]

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[ras]

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.

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.

Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

This was posted below:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...
The data is from Lazard Asset Management... a reputable source.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

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?

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[mspohr]

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...

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[doom]

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.

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.

Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive

[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

Don't let the door hit...

[cellocgw]

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.

Re:Don't let the door hit...

[b0bby]

Thanks, I'll make sure to get my next nuclear power plant from someone else!

Re:Don't let the door hit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Toshiba Customer Support: Hello, and thank you for calling Toshiba Customer Support. How can I help you today?
cellocgw: There's hole burning through the bottom of my Toshiba Nuclear Power Plant and it's really, really hot in here. What should I do?
TCS: Have you tried rebooting?
c: Yes, I've tried rebooting. I've also pulled the core out while the reactor was on and then re-inserted to core and turned it back on. That's how I fix my Blackberry.
TCS: Great. What happened when you did that?
c: I got even hotter and now my hand is swelling up.
TCS: Good, that shows the core is still working. Is you're reactor connected to the Internet? Can you request Remote Assistance?
c: Sure, doing that now.
TCS: What credit card will you be using to pay for today's Remote Assistance?
c: What, I'm not paying?!?
TCS: Sir, the warranty on your reactor expired yesterday.
c: What?!? Fuck Toshiba and the [generic beast of burden] they rode in on. You have by far the worst consumer customer service I've ever run across.

Re:Don't let the door hit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lmaooooooooooo!

Re:Don't let the door hit...

[dwywit]

Never dealt with Asus, I suspect.

I'm rather displeased with Toshiba, too, but not for that reason. They've pulled out of the low-end and consumer laptop business, which is a shame, because in 10 years I've only had one customer with a fault that required talking to Toshiba customer support.

Now I've got to find a new brand that has similar reliability. Perhaps I'll give Lenovo a try - wouldn't touch HP with a ten-foot pole.

Re: don't know a business? don't buy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

return to profits is easy...

[higuita]

As this is in the USA, to return to profits is easy... just cut down costs!

example, turn off those pumps... they are pumping water all day in a cycle, it is going no where, just turn then off!
everything is always breaking or cracking, just delay repair one month and you will see that you will save one months of repairs... do this all 10 months and you will save 10 months! pure profit!!
all that space and tech to store radioactive waste... just dump it to the near river, let nature (and the bible) deal with it

Just do not forget to give first some stock to trump and all "tea party" republicans and you will for sure be praised as a great business! :D

Re:return to profits is easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:return to profits is easy...

[higuita]

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

My HDs and Toshiba's Profits

[bigdady92]

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

Does Toshiba make any iPhone parts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm planning on getting the next iPhone and dont want anything to delay it.

Do we still need nuclear?

[butchersong]

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.

Re:Do we still need nuclear?

[aaarrrgggh]

Going from memory, but I did the math for an off-grid house at 34 degrees latitude some time back, with a winter daily energy consumption of 18kWh and summer around 28-30. With 40kWh of battery, I would need 15kW of PV on a 2-axis tracker plus a 2kW generator that would need to run about 40 hours per year. To get the generator down to 8 hours per year, I needed to double the battery. This left me "burning" half my annual energy production, as there was no need for all the summer production.

In essence, this is the challenge for solar. Half the energy you produce, if deployed everywhere, is useless, and storage has diminishing returns. My system would have a cost of ~$75,000, but would only offset $36k of utility bills. A net-metered solution would only cost $18k to offset the energy use.

Who wants to pay 2-3x for their electricity?

Now some caveats: the idea for the home was not to be off-grid, on-propane, so all cooking and heating were electric, which is inherently a non-economical decision. The home also had higher than optimal energy consumption for an off-grid design; a few less essential functions would need to be shut off, temperature reduced in the winter, cooking focused on noon time, etc, to make it really work. But, it is a fair comparison for grid economics.

Re:Do we still need nuclear?

[dwywit]

If you were to replace electric heating with gas/wood, and electric cooking with gas (or wood), your daily kWh (of electrical demand) would plummet. Any electrical heating element is a killer for off-grid use.

Is air-conditioning part of the consideration? Are you planning to live somewhere that you might do without it? Is your off-grid house going to have some passive cooling designs?

If you want to go off-grid, you've *got* to change your outlook. In order to avoid spending more money on PV, batteries, and backup generator fuel, your whole approach to energy use must change. Do an energy aufit of your current usage, and decide how much of that could be made more efficient, e.g. LED to replace incandescent lighting.

FWIW, my house of 2 adults and 2 teenagers used ~9kWh daily when I last did an audit. No aircon, no electric heating or cooking, all wood and gas. All but one of us use a laptop instead of energy-hungry desktops, and we don't do without anything else, except blackouts.

Re:Do we still need nuclear?

[aaarrrgggh]

Completely agree and understand; the plan was mainly an energy balance exercise and I understood the stupidity of trying to do it that way (if it was real) when I started. But, when you scale it to a discussion about the overall grid and means of stored energy it is relevant.

Re:Do we still need nuclear?

[Anonymous Coward]

Burning wood may be fine for individuals or families, but as you scale up into the hundreds of thousands or millions of households, you get a lot of smog/smoke, and then you run out of trees.

Not funny, just a flat out lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Will you stop bullshitting if I do? No, you won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

AP1000

[MrKaos]

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.

Re: don't know a business? don't buy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nuclear Power is a Loser

[herbierobinson]

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.