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.

Comments

A great man turns in his grave... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See my subject: George Westinghouse was a brilliant engineer (who believed in another great EE in Tesla himself) whose legacy is over - what a shame...

APK

P.S.=> At 1st, all I knew about was Nikola Tesla's fantastic accomplishments & then I looked into Westinghouse & was equally impressed... apk

It's just too expensive

[mspohr]

Nuclear power has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter"
Everything (coal, gas, wind, solar) is cheaper than nuclear.

Re:It's just too expensive

[speedplane]

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 why I don't understand the current development of ITER. Even if it's scientifically successful, there's just no possibility that it'll economically successful in the next century.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, a "subsidy" that has cost the US taxpayer exactly $0 over all time. Limited liability is not a concept exclusive to nuclear; it even applies to hydro among other things.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And what liability do coal power operators face in the event of an incident? Hydro operators? What about the everyday ongoing damage that those operations do?

This isn't some sort of a double standard in favor of nuclear power.

Re:It's just too expensive

[guruevi]

Nuclear power in and off itself is cleaner and cheaper than any of them, as the article said, it's very profitable once you have them.

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.

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

Bullshit. Letting a commercial company produce a reactor vulnerable to meltdown, allowing it to irradiate a populated region for hundreds of years, and then let the company declare itself bankrupt after that event is hardly cheap or cost effective.

Fukushima is the first such example of such a disaster in a western economy. Chernobyl was a failure induced by the USSR's response to cold war pressures - they knew how to build safer reactors, but they chose to live dangerously and operate more less expensive reactors instead. In the west, we can afford to build safer reactors, but instead, politically, we have chosen to grandfather the existing ones past their original design lives and block construction of newer, safer designs - that finally came home to roost in Fukushima - somewhat ironic for the country that also suffered the only atomic strikes during wartime.

Fukushima is a horror story, and a tremendously costly event, but Three Mile Island+Chernobyl+Fukushima+every other nuclear accident, ever, are not even close to as costly as the cumulative damage of coal power to-date. Strip-mines to feed coal power plants consume far more land than radiation exclusion zones, and the out of control coal mine fires are even less eco-friendly than the radiation exclusion zones.

Kill birds, dam rivers, gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar, spew sulfur and mercury into the air, all forms of electricity production have their prices.

Re:It's just too expensive

[sphealey]

Try buying an insurance policy equivalent to a single plant's Price-Anderson waiver on the open market and let us know now the underwriters price it out.

Re:It's just too expensive

[silentcoder]

>Kill birds

That one is such bullshit. The high estimate for birds killed by wind power is about 290-thousand a year - or a thousand times less than the number of birds killed by cats. And, for coal the high estimate is 790-million a year. Coal kills more birds than any other power generation technology - and it beats out wind 30 times over.

>gobble up real-estate and cover it with semi-toxic panels for solar
This concern is real, but largely overblown - considering the vast majority of solar real estate is otherwise useless (to humans or the environment) real estate like rooftops.

>all forms of electricity production have their prices.
True but these prices are not all the same - in fact they aren't even similar.

You get the same outcome if you look at immediate human deathtolls - coal is orders of magnitude higher than anything else, including nuclear. Coal kills millions of people every year. And even if you exclude mining and pollution deaths - just the deaths in coal construction outnumber the total deathtoll from all nuclear accidents ever several times over.
Some Trump cabinet member tried to sell that argument on the radio yesterday too - that no energy is really clean so we may as well use dirty coal.But it's a bullshit argument. It's like saying "No food is free so we may as well all eat caviar".

Re:It's just too expensive

[drinkypoo]

Natural gas is abnormally low at the moment as it appears to me.

Natural gas' low, low price is the result of fracking. It's abominably low.

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,

That is only because the industry is allowed to push thousands of years of externalities (from mine tailings) off onto everyone else on the planet.

even factoring in decommissioning fund set asides.

The decommissioning always costs more than it is supposed to. And you also don't get to crow about the total cost until the waste is either reprocessed or safely interred.

Renewable are hitting nuclear pretty hard too. Not because they make sense based on cost,

If you account for externalities, which anyone who likes breathing should care about, they make a hell of a lot more sense based on cost.

Basically the government is funding renewable build-out on the backs of the utility companies,

The ones that have been willfully poisoning us? You shouldn't have skipped Erin Brockovich. It wasn't a great movie, but it does ram the point home.

Solar isn't doing much good that time of year, and wind turbines don't turn in a vortex calm.

The answer is more storage and a more robust grid that actually permits shipping power around the country as needed. Our infrastructure is pathetic.

Re:It's just too expensive

[silentcoder]

>As coal declines and wind power ramps up, those numbers will trade places.

Unlikely. Firstly we're not replacing all coal with wind, solar makes up more of the replacement than wind does. Secondly wind numbers for new installations are going down as more recent designs have been improved to be safer for birds (it makes economic sense because killing birds also damages the expensive wind generators which is costly), there's no reason to assume this trend won't continue (meanwhile no attempt was ever made to reduce the numbers for coal). Eventually coal numbers may reach zero if we phase it out entirely, and wind will certainly go up from where it is - but it's highly unlikely that it will ever get anywhere near the number that coal has now. So "trade places" is not even slightly an accurate description.

>I am saying that if you stand under a turbine in an area where birds are flying near the blades, you'll see birds that were killed by it lying on the ground.
And if you stand in a place where humans have settled and cats are not prohibited - you will find birds killed by cats. More often actually. I never said this wasn't a factor, it is, and it's a factor that engineers are putting active resources into mitigating it's just not nearly as big a factor as some people would have us believe.

>Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline
Species ? Probably not - but we will likely cull the individuals who are least good at avoiding moving obstacles like that which, on top of the aforementioned engineering efforts will bring numbers down further. Excessive death by any human activity, if not enough to bring about extinction causes adaptation - often rapidly. As it stands there is a growing number of African elephants being born without tusks. 300 years of the biggest tuskers getting hunted first has been seriously favoring the smaller-toothed ones for having babies. This is rapid evolution due to a massive pressure on the population (elephant numbers today are well under 1000th of what they were 300 years ago). Those with no tusks at all probably rarely procreated at all in the past, making it a rare mutation, but since humans started getting serious about ivory hunting that mutation became a major life-prolonger, and so got to be spread over a much larger percentage of each subsequent generation - while the overall SIZE of each subsequent generation shrank on the same timeline. So soon something that was a one in a million rarity can come to be 20% or more of the (now much smaller) total.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar isn't doing much good that time of year, and wind turbines don't turn in a vortex calm.

The answer is more storage and a more robust grid that actually permits shipping power around the country as needed. Our infrastructure is pathetic.

Well, but then you must add the cost of storage and the beefier grid to the cost of solar/wind plants.

"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And keep in mind that a well-designed power generation network draws from numerous sources of energy. Yes, coal is currently one of these sources. It's smart and responsible for President Trump to include it within America's energy generation infrastructure. It will provide at least some redundancy in case there are disruptions to the availability or economic viability of oil, natural gas and/or uranium in the future. Increasing America's energy independence is an extremely important goal, regardless of your political beliefs.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Chas]

You mean like every other form of power in this country that's subsidized?

Or are you going to address the 60+ years of social engineering designed to demonize and hinder the development of nuclear power into a cheaper, but more ubiquitous form?

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Anonymous Coward]

Six or seven years ago I, a nuclear engineer, would have said the exact same thing. Today I, a robotics engineer, have left the nuclear field completely because I couldn't ignore the systemic problems I saw, the pathological thought processes of the people running the show, or the mountains of empirical results that disagreed with my expectations and made me question the assumptions built into the foundations of the industry.

The nuclear field's safety record is stellar, at least in the USA, so honestly that's a non-issue, but clean and safe nuclear power has never been cost effective. The controls required to meet current American safety standards are prohibitively expensive, especially when you include capital and legacy costs. All the nuclear plants being built today have the same construction delays and budget overruns that the plants from 50 years ago had. We haven't solved any of those problems, even though we've been working on them for the better part of a century. France has done some very interesting work, but their state sponsored Areva has been on the brink of collapse for ten years now and the USA still refuses to even consider the fuel reprocessing methods that enabled France's successes. Looking forward, all of the "radical new" plant designs I've seen, and I've talked to engineer-salesmen from Westinghouse and other companies, are strained niche products. Their promoters have to make complex, contorted arguments as to why their system is a viable product that eventually can turn a profit, not why it's the optimal solution for anyone's real world problems.

On top of that, wind and solar energy are exploding, growing and maturing faster than the most optimistic supporters predicted even ten years ago. Semiconductor science is improving the efficiency of solar cells, economies of scale are making them less expensive to produce, and decades of continuous, successful marketing and lobbying is making them more available. And the last time I did a road trip from one nuclear lab in Texas to another nuclear lab in New Mexico, the highways were lined with wind turbines for 200 miles straight. In 2017, both wind and solar are far less expensive than even the most optimistic projections for nuclear. Their only real market competition is dirt cheap natural gas. The primary recent argument in favor of nuclear, which actually isn't even an argument for nuclear so much as against renewable, has been that we couldn't build renewables fast enough to meet demand. But as of today, wind and solar each, separately, have installed capacity roughly equal to nuclear installed capacity globally . Yes that's peak, not actual, but look at the growth rates. They're not slowing down.

In a nutshell, I gave up on nuclear power after investing a decade of my life in it because it's a solution in search of a problem. It's cool as hell if you're a physics fan, and I am a nuclear physics fan, but that's about it. Its strongest supporters support it because they like the technology, not because they think it's genuinely the optimal solution for any real world problem.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[thegarbz]

I can even name a few that can work fully renewable.

I can name a few that would never work fully renewable. What's your point. Hell let's narrow it down further. Nuclear would never work on my house, but neither would any form except for solar, so solar is the only option!

There's a reason we include the words "world" when discussing a general topic like "technology".

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Shakrai]

not because they think it's genuinely the optimal solution for any real world problem

Three words: Base load power.

Even the most optimistic assessment of solar and wind do not envision them as a replacement for the base load. I'm only aware of two carbon-neutral sources for base load power: nuclear and hydro. The latter doesn't have much room left for growth, certainly not enough to replace coal and natural gas, so what does that leave you with?

Frankly, I don't see how anyone that accepts anthropological climate change can be against nuclear power. If you believe the impact of climate change to be as bad as many say it will be then the economics of nuclear power are irrelevant. It's a necessary investment to bring down carbon emissions.

Re:Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[haruchai]

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.

Obama is responsible for every bad thing that's happened to an American from the day he engineered his own birth; Hillary shares responsibility starting from the day she first had sex with Bill Clinton

Re:It was bound to happen

[drinkypoo]

And, had TEPCO (not Westinghouse) followed their site engineers' directions and built a better sea wall, NOTHING WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

Yes, or if they had placed the backup generators on pylons. Or if they had observed the ages-old stone marker that said "don't build anything below this point because it can flood", that would also have done the trick.

However, any reactor design which requires external power to scram is inherently unsafe and should be decommissioned immediately, because unforeseen events occur, and develop into unforeseen consequences.