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Westinghouse Files For Bankruptcy, In Blow To Nuclear Power (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Westinghouse Electric Co, a unit of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba Corp, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, hit by billions of dollars of cost overruns at four nuclear reactors under construction in the U.S. Southeast. The bankruptcy casts doubt on the future of the first new U.S. nuclear power plants in three decades, which were scheduled to begin producing power as soon as this week, but are now years behind schedule. The four reactors are part of two projects known as V.C. Summer in South Carolina, which is majority owned by SCANA Corp, and Vogtle in Georgia, which is owned by a group of utilities led by Southern Co. Costs for the projects have soared due to increased safety demands by U.S. regulators, and also due to significantly higher-than-anticipated costs for labor, equipment and components. Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse said it hopes to use bankruptcy to isolate and reorganize around its "very profitable" nuclear fuel and power plant servicing businesses from its money-losing construction operation. Westinghouse said in a court filing it has secured $800 million in financing from Apollo Investment Corp, an affiliate of Apollo Global Management, to fund its core businesses during its reorganization. Westinghouse's nuclear services business is expected to continue to perform profitably over the course of the bankruptcy and eventually be sold by Toshiba, people familiar with the matter said. When regulators in Georgia and South Carolina approved the construction of Westinghouse's AP1000 reactors in 2009, it was meant to be the start of renewed push to develop U.S. nuclear power. However, a flood of cheap natural gas from shale, the lack of U.S. legislation to curb carbon emissions and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan dampened enthusiasm for nuclear power. Toshiba had acquired Westinghouse in 2006 for $5.4 billion. It expected to build dozens of its new AP1000 reactors -- which were hailed as safer, quicker to construct and more compact -- creating a pipeline of work for its maintenance division.
The Japanese own our Nuclear Power Plant Construction Companies
The Russians own our Uranium.... such a great job Obama and Hillary did
Those sales should have been stopped
Toshiba acquired Westinghouse in 2006.
Bush was president and Republicans controlled Congress.
Nuclear is as expensive as we make it, just like wind, solar, and gas benefit from subsidies and lax regulations, nuclear is suffering from (perhaps justified) regulatory costs and lack of substantial subsidies.
Nuclear power is needed because wind power, solar power, and hydro power alone are insufficient to meet the world's demand for electricity.
Leave the world out of this, I am fairly sure you don't speak for them especially since I can name a few dozen countries that have never had nuclear power and are doing quite well.
I can even name a few that can work fully renewable.
Besides the usual array of subsidies available to large-scale projects in general and energy projects in particular, nuclear power receives an effectively infinite subsidy in the form of the Price-Anderson Act which limits the liability of nuclear power operators in the event of an incident.
Westinghouse took a huge risk when they bought the CB&I Stone and Webster construction company that was building the reactors in the USA. They didn't examine their accounts properly and the construction company was hiding huge debts. Since Toshiba bought Westinghouse, to get the AP1000 reactor design, they inherited that financial burden. Given the news from Toshiba last year you had to know the shakedown at Westinghouse would come eventually. Toshiba bet a lot on this deal and they lost tremendously. This will setback nuclear power R&D in the West for like a decade at least.
The nuclear reactors in the USA are being built under a fixed price contract. With all the changes that were required to the design, because of regulation changes, plus the fact that no one had built a lot of new reactors in the USA in decades, meant there was a high risk with a deal like that. Couple that with the oil price and natural gas price crashes and the deal is pretty bad. They probably thought they would recoup the losses with further reactor construction in the USA in the future once these initial reactors were built and their licensing was done and construction knowledge improved but there's little chance of it happening anymore.
Still there are going to be like four reactors of this same AP1000 design going online in China this year at two locations. Plus the Chinese already have a license to build an enlarged version of it they call the CAP1400 for which they intend to do serial production in relatively large amounts. So even if these are the last AP1000 reactors to be build in the USA, construction of the licensed designs will continue in China. The Chinese don't have a lot of natural gas, unlike the USA, and given the air pollution issues they have in their large coastal cities, they have few alternatives to nuclear if they want to reduce atmospheric pollution.
Nuclear power has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter"
Everything (coal, gas, wind, solar) is cheaper than nuclear.
That's not even remotely true. [Disclaimer, I work at a lab that analyzes nuclear plant effluent samples] On a cost/Megawatt basis nuclear is equivalent to natural gas at the moment, both of which are significantly cheaper than wind or solar (neither of which will compete directly on cost any time soon). Natural gas is abnormally low at the moment as it appears to me. I suspect that as that industry matures, more gas plants are built, and more regulations put in place, the price of gas will make it more expensive than nuclear again.
The real trouble is the price of nuclear is entirely up front, one massive lump sum and more than a decade to build (largely due to litigation). After that, the fuel is just this side of free considering the power you can produce from it, even factoring in decommissioning fund set asides. Because the plunge is so deep and so long, it's hard to commit the resources versus throwing up a cheap gas plant or a few subsidized solar panels (short term gains, good for shareholders). And because no new plants are being built and smaller plants are decommissioning, the economy of scale for the industry in the US is starting to break down.
Renewable are hitting nuclear pretty hard too. Not because they make sense based on cost, but because utilities are being forced to buy the renewable power at huge markups on hot sunny days, when they would normally be able to sell their own power really cheap from nuclear. Then on crappy days when the renewables aren't producing, nuclear power isn't getting any extra credit for the baseload it is maintaining. Basically the government is funding renewable build-out on the backs of the utility companies, at the expense of a form of power that really serves a vital purpose. Which people will find out as the weather gets more extreme. For example, the US nuclear industry is the only reason there weren't large-scale outages the last time there was a polar vortex in the northeast... the air got so cold the stacks on the natural gas plants stopped functioning as designed, and they had to cycle down. Solar isn't doing much good that time of year, and wind turbines don't turn in a vortex calm. It was only nuclear keeping the lights going, and only just. I've seen a few presentations on it at industry conferences, and the guys giving them weren't always from the nuclear industry, one was a spokesperson for a conglomeration of small utility who seemed a little shell-shocked by the whole thing.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...
They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.
See that "Preview" button?
Nuclear power is needed because wind power, solar power, and hydro power alone are insufficient to meet the world's demand for electricity.
Even if lefties don't like to admit it, the reality is that nuclear power is one of the most effective and efficient ways of generating large amounts of electrical power.
Bullshit. Nuclear power is economically unsustainable without direct government intervention and subsidy. The only thing notable about nuclear power is that it doesn't require utilizing "fossilized carbon" in order to produce its relatively large and "dangerous" power.
And mind you, I am actually a supporter of nuclear power subsidization by the federal gov't. But 1950's technology should not be propagated or even used to replace old nuclear reactors. There should be a working model for non-fissile (thorium) nuclear reactors which then can be propagated commercially, modern designs that make nuclear meltdowns near impossible, and a sustainable program to reprocess and safely dispose of nuclear waste.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Self inflicted - this folks is exactly what happens when you spend far more on PR than on R&D.
Westinghouse could be rolling in cash selling something far better than their antiquated AP1000 design to an energy hungry China, but they chose instead to slap some green paint on something from the 1970s and call it done.
Westinghouse lobbied AGAINST government nuclear research during the Clinton administration because it was using Thorium and Westinghouse wanted to use their Uranium designs as long as possible. They saw Thorium as a threat to their business model.
The US nuclear lobby ate their own children and this is the expected consequence.
When the ash pile collapses into the nearby stream and poisons everything downstream for miles? Generally, the power company gets bailout help from the local government and zero liability for damages. Whether that's backed by an official law, or just common practice between utilities and government, it's what's happened again and again for coal and other power generation plants that poison their local environment, both subtly with incompletely scrubbed stack emissions, and dramatically with things like fly-ash avalanches.
Ah, another Infowars/Fox "News" fan. A mining operation owned by Russian company has rights to mine a percentage of the uranium in our country -- which they then must sell to the U.S.
Please get you facts straight.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
The problem is that it took Westinghouse over 25 years to construct a handful of reactors because of various lawsuits and regulatory changes. When you have to halt a lawsuit every time a NIMBY organization is resurrected, you're not going to get very far.
Bingo. Here in Canada our nuclear reactors don't run into this same level of opposition, but there have been multiple cases where something similar has happened. The new medical reactor to replace the aging chalk lake medical reactor is a good example. CL is nearly 70 years old, and supplies the world with half of the specialized medical isotopes. The replacement reactor was supposed to be online a decade ago, NIMBY's and out-of-country environmental groups are the exact cause of that. While sites like Pickering and Bruce(2nd largest nuclear generating station in the world), have operated well with little to no issues. The cost of nuclear on the grid is under 0.04kWh at sale. The referb cost which is added in bumps it to just under 0.07kWh, and the "referb cost" is added during the last 10 years of the reactors operation cycle to pay for refueling and the maintenance period.
Green energy here is insanely priced because of the FiT programs. Those prices paid are between 0.20kWh to 1.5kWh, yeah that's $1.50kWh.
Om, nomnomnom...
Sure they do. Significant energy is required to pump the gas; that energy is lost in the process. There's no free lunch to be had just because gas moves in a pipeline. Same goes for oil.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If rendering land uninhabitable is an issue, you must hate hydro which has rendered huge swaths of land uninhabitable to all native plant and animal species. No other source comes close.
As for irrational fears of easily managed fuel waste, I recommend education.