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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.
Solyndra went bankrupt because its initial business plan did not take into account the level of Chinese manufacture, subsidy, and eventual dumping (which also did not exist at the time Solyndra was a nascient enterprise in the planning stages).
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
It sort of should make a lot of sense for Japan due to Japan's reliance on energy imports, but it's been so badly run there that people are not putting up with it.
Everywhere else it's a side benefit of a nuclear weapons program with civilian costs lower in places where the weapons program is large and can do a lot of the economic heavy lifting. It's worked better in France, Russia etc than in the USA IMHO because governments were able to push some progress internally. In the USA companies like Westinghouse were happy to just slap a bit of green paint on a 1970s design and court politicians with hookers and blow (MASSIVE PR budget) in the hope that taxpayers money would be thrown at their "private sector" operations.
If they actually innovated they could have made a reactor good enough to be able to borrow from a bank to build it.
Or we could, you know, build clean garbage incineration units like they have in Europe which are actually net producers of energy.
We do have trash to steam plants in the US. I know Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ have them and I'm sure there are more, but you'll have to look those up. Funny thing is though that often trash to steam plants are advertised as "recycling centers"... which is a little stretch of the truth [or green-washing], but whatever they call it, it's better than a landfill.
It's economically practical.
It's just that 60+ years of social and political engineering (see "fearmongering") by the "nukes = BOMBS!" crowd have basically destroy almost any chance of sensible nuclear infrastructure in this country.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You are a conspiracy nut.
Finns are quite okay with nuclear power, yet the new Olkiluoto block they are currently building suffers from huge cost overruns and shitty construction quality.
Klaus Traube, probably the most prominent nuclear power opponent in Germany, used to be a lead nuclear engineer at General Electrics, AEG and KWU and developed a fast sodium cooled breeder reactor. He opposed nuclear power because of his experience and stated that it never can be economically practical.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This is a funny comment because on the one hand it's very sensible to point out that's critically over engineered, but the reason 'ass clown geeks out of control' is ridiculous. The reason it's overengineered is that they first invested a lot in a compact design that would fit into a military submarine, and then the civilians continued in that direction and got locked in. Then there came the security concerns which kept piling up, and that led to the complex very expensive designs because the basic model was unsafe. So now they have the safest ever nuclear plants which nobody here wants.
The market for nuclear in China dried up years ago with Fukushima. It's not the tech, it's the cost and risk.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
And it was stellar before the regulations were ratcheted up, causing the cost to quadruple.
The reason that nuclear is prohibitively expensive is that we've pushed the safety standards far, far beyond what any rational analysis would require. We could reduce them dramatically and still have the safest power generation technology mankind has ever produced.
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.
Nonsense. There's a very clear problem: clean, safe, cheap, large-scale power generation. Regulations have killed the "cheap" part, in order to add a few more nines to an already-outstanding safety record. Worse, they've so badly damaged the industry that newer designs that are inherently cheaper and safer can't even get off the ground because everyone is afraid to invest in them because of what the NRC might think of to hamstring those as well.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
Luckily, it looks like renewables are progressing and might someday be able to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. It'll take a lot longer and be a lot more expensive than nuclear, though. Our insane nuclear power regulations are going to make global warming significantly worse and the economic impact of managing it much greater.
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