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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.
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.
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?