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

Re: A great man turns in his grave... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Im pretty fucking impressed with him too. Mr Westinghouse invented the hosts file, as you all know. Without that, you'd be out of a job.

Re:Economics wins again

[cheesybagel]

Natural gas doesn't make sense everywhere. In places where there aren't natural gas pipelines nearby, or coal mines, or hydropower, nuclear still makes sense.

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

[JoeMerchant]

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.

Re:It's just too expensive

[sphealey]

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.

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

[cheesybagel]

Fusion power is a wholly different kettle of fish. But yes, it is more uneconomic than fission power unless the technology changes radically.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, Rooftop Solar: Too Expensive to Meter.

Renewables are "cheap" because they are mandated, they enjoy grid priority, and they are heavily subsidized. This extremely distorted market is very hostile to all reliable power generators, not just nuclear. When wind and solar are so heavily subsidized that they can (and do) pay people to take their power, it is rather difficult for anything else to compete; even reactors producing electricity for 2-3c/kWh.

Financing and construction of new conventional reactors is obviously a problem, but the actual cost of nuclear power can be very low, and modern technologies can do better yet. Of course, the unfavorable market conditions prompting premature closure of nuclear plants constrain supply, and the parent utilities are more than happy to replace it with cheap natural gas.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[slashdot_commentator]

Nuclear is as expensive as we make it,

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.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Bongo]

I work at a lab that analyzes nuclear plant effluent samples

This is why I love Slashdot. Great, informative post. Thank you!
 

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

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.

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

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:It's just too expensive

[CrimsonAvenger]

hernobyl was a failure induced by the USSR's response to cold war pressures

Chernobyl was caused by a test. Specifically, someone wanted to know how much power they could extract from a reactor during a meltdown to fight the meltdown.

So, they pushed the reactor as far into meltdown condition as they could safely do for the test. And then found out they were wrong about how far "safely do" was...

In other words, no, it wasn't an unsafe design. It was an insande decision by a bureaucrat somewhere....

On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem....

Re:It's just too expensive

[silentcoder]

Nuclear suffers from being huge. Huge is bad. Megaprojects almost always end up being way over-budget and even further over deadline. This is a problem in all mega-project construction and Nuclear falls into that category. Coal sometimes as well - and when it does those plants also, always, way over budget and deadline. Part of the problem is that the sheer scale of the projects make accurate budgeting and planning almost impossible. There's just so much room for mistakes, errors and unexpected events that it's impossible to foresee them all, or even estimate how much fudge factor build in for them. The other is that these things take so long - the longer a project takes the more chance there is for changes way outside it to actually impact it (things like new laws getting passed).

There's the fact that megaprojects must inevitably demand mega-management teams - so you end up with all the worst problems of burocracy, whether they be government or corporate (or most commonly both) which further adds to the mix. You have endless opportunities for skimming and corruption and kickbacks - and that adds both cost and time. You have a massive work-force - which makes you particularly sensitive to labour market fluctuations.

You could do what Dubai did prepping for the soccer world cup and kill 1400 people a year by just not bothering to make the construction work safe (which is what happens when you have lax regulations ) but you would STILL be overbudget and over-time (as they were).
Ultimately - at the scale where nuclear builds have to operate - these things will always be a problem. It's a major downside of anything that has to be done at that scale.

And yes, it's subject to a lot of regulation - megaprojects usually are - because they have to be. Where the regulation is absent they are STILL always late and overbudget - they just kill a lot more people, so you may as well have the regulation.

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

[AmiMoJo]

Comparing to coal is pointless. The competition now is wind and solar and gas. Even with trump's removal of regulations, coal isn't coming back because it can't compete.

Re:It's just too expensive

[AmiMoJo]

Renewable plus battery is vastly cheaper than nuclear in Europe. How come the US is doing it on the cheap?

Re:It's just too expensive

[drinkypoo]

On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem...

Yeah, instead it produces a radioactive exclusion zone, where even on its fringes only old people can live without substantially increasing their cancer risk. And cancer rates already doubled during the industrial revolution, without the lifespan increasing sufficiently to account for the difference. And we learned fuck-all.

Re:It's just too expensive

[drinkypoo]

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.

But only coal and nuclear are based on strip mining, and leave toxic tailings behind in every case even though the industry claims it has learned to take care of all that. Coal and oil each kill more birds than solar, and we now make bigger, slower wind turbines that kill less birds. Solar panels are now required not to leach their contents when landfilled and even you have had to drop your rhetoric from saying "toxic" to "semi-toxic". Maybe you should try actually dropping your rhetoric from toxic to semi-toxic, if you care so much about pollution. You're spreading a lot of it around.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Richard_at_work]

Its worth noting that the test they conducted on that fateful day at Chernobyl was actually the fourth time the test was being run, so it wasnt the test that was the issue, it was the fact that the test this time was run it was done so without meeting the initial test parameters...

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

[bill_mcgonigle]

it was the fact that the test this time was run it was done so without meeting the initial test parameters...

And the political appointees at the plant overrode the engineers on the project because the lead on the project was one of the sons of an appointee (shades of the Challenger disaster).

One of the engineer's sons is a Slashdotter and has written frequently about how that went down. "Shocker" that it's not in the official Soviet record, but it's a far more believable story.

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem...

Yeah, instead it produces a radioactive exclusion zone, where even on its fringes only old people can live without substantially increasing their cancer risk. And cancer rates already doubled during the industrial revolution, without the lifespan increasing sufficiently to account for the difference. And we learned fuck-all.

Also... the exclusion zone is better for wildlife than "normal" forest preserves where humans can still enter. Not saying it's "good" for wildlife per-se, but it's better for wildlife than co-existence pressure from H. sapiens.

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

it was the fact that the test this time was run it was done so without meeting the initial test parameters...

And the political appointees at the plant overrode the engineers on the project because the lead on the project was one of the sons of an appointee (shades of the Challenger disaster).

One of the engineer's sons is a Slashdotter and has written frequently about how that went down. "Shocker" that it's not in the official Soviet record, but it's a far more believable story.

And, in the "told you so" vein, they wouldn't have been in such a risk taking mood if they hadn't been under pressure from the Cold war to do more with less.

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

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

I'm not saying don't build wind turbines because they're going to wipe out the migratory species, 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.

Over time, we'll cull the species that can't avoid the blades and deaths will decline - a similar thing happened with pigeons that stood on the tracks of the Miami metro-mover.

Re:It's just too expensive

[JoeMerchant]

People come out hard against one form of energy production or another, the truth is that they all have their costs, and the ones that appear better today mostly do so because they haven't been rolled out big like coal, so they haven't been fully analyzed for all the external costs.

Yes, some are better than others, and I put solar high on the "good" list, probably followed by wind, but they will both start to lose their appeal as they scale up - I don't think to a point as bad as coal was in the 1960s, but they will not look as attractive as they do now while they're new and cool.

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

[drinkypoo]

I put solar high on the "good" list, probably followed by wind, but they will both start to lose their appeal as they scale up - I don't think to a point as bad as coal was in the 1960s, but they will not look as attractive as they do now while they're new and cool.

You have it backwards. They become more attractive as you install more. But again, you need more storage to smooth out the inevitable dips, and you need a more robust grid so that we can [effectively] ship power across the country, to places which need it most. Our lack of commitment to infrastructure should be immediately worrying to anyone with any experience maintaining any. That should include, for example, all IT professionals, which are (or at least were) a significant percentage of the Slashdot readership.

Re:It's just too expensive

[tehcyder]

On the plus side, everyone learned a lot from Chernobyl. Including that the "radioactive wasteland" that a meltdown was supposed to produce was an imaginary problem....

Yeah, it's just superstition that stops people living there.

Just because somewhere is not a "radioactive wasteland" doesn't mean it's OK.

Re:It's just too expensive

[drinkypoo]

Also... the exclusion zone is better for wildlife than "normal" forest preserves where humans can still enter.

Citation needed. Compare it to, say, Yellowstone. Nobody is trying to reintroduce endangered or threatened species to the exclusion zone. Places where humans enter and even tamper can be superior to the results of nature, if that is our goal. Typically people are there to loot and pillage, but sometimes we attempt to curate with varying degrees of success.

Re:It's just too expensive

[vyvepe]

I have one invoice here for electricity from Slovakia, EU.
It contains an item called system fee: 8.459 EUR per MWh of all delivered energy
It also contains an item called nuclear fund fee: 3.852 EUR per MWh of all the delivered energy
Most of the "system fee" is used to support solar power plants. Let's be generous to solar and let's say only half of the "system fee" is to support solar. Solar power plants produced 3.15% of all the delivered energy. Nuclear power plants produced 53% of all the delivered energy. Therefore the solar energy is at least (8.459*0.5/3.15) / (3.852/53) = 18.47 times more expensive than nuclear in Slovakia. I do not understand how people can claim solar is cheaper than nuclear when the invoice here indicates that the subsidy paid to solar is more than 18 times bigger than subsidy paid to nuclear per 1 kWh of the energy produced by given source.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe subsidises renewable (and 'renewable') energy.

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.

Re: It's just too expensive

[mspohr]

Your fees bear no relationship to the cost of the energy.
New wind and solar installations are bid (without subsidies) at a lower cost per kWh than coal, gas or nuclear (which receive many other subsidies).

Re:It's just too expensive

[hey!]

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

No, you have to add the cost of a beefier grid to everyone who wants to sell power over a long distance, including nuclear plants. A better grid would make nuclear more economical too.

Re:It's just too expensive

[cnaumann]

Fusion power is also fission power. All current fusion technologies involve He3 or tritium, but of which are fission byproducts created by bombarding lithium with neutrons. The current thinking is to place lithium in the fusion reactors to soak up the neutrons and produce heat and fuel, effectively making them hybrid fission / fusion reactors.

Re: It's just too expensive

[vyvepe]

Well, may be it is so in USA. But It is hard to argue against an invoice which has nicely written all the components of the final price and what the components are used for. I assume you want to indicate that the invoice is intentionally deceiving. Why would they do it? They can be held liable for false information on invoices.
As for as the wind energy, there is hardly any ground level wind in Slovakia. This is probably not true for other countries. Only 0.21% of all electricity is produced from wind.

Re:It's just too expensive

[budgenator]

Yes actually it was an unsafe design, It had a positive void coefficient of 4.7 beta, which means the reactor increases power if the coolant boils and it had graphite tipped control rods the reaction literally has to increase before it starts to shut down. These control rods make the RBMK reactors unstable at low power. Additionally the positive void coefficient makes the RBMK very susceptible to xenon oscillations.
With a safer design that had a negative void coefficient, the same "test" would have been much more difficult to impossible.

Re: It's just too expensive

[mspohr]

Your fees are the result of a political regulatory process and have little relationship to reality. If you want to see the true cost, you'll need to follow the money and also look at other subsidies.

Re: It's just too expensive

[vyvepe]

Well, without some additional data about energy subsidizes in Slovakia your claim can be also interpreted as:
In some countries, solar is one of the cheapest sources of energy

because of a political regulatory process and has little relationship to reality.

In other words, nobody really knows what is actually cheaper if sweeping claims like you posted are allowed.

Re: It's just too expensive

[mspohr]

Thanks to the internet and Google, it's very easy to find out the cost of wind and solar renewables and how they compare to nuclear and fossil fuels.
Here are a few references from the first pages of Google results:
https://cleantechnica.com/2017...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
https://www.greentechmedia.com...
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...

Try it yourself, you might learn something.

Re:It's just too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah, woah, hold on there. This is very misleading.

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).

You are talking about variable costs ONLY, in which case I agree with your point, for what that's worth. But that is irrelevant to whether a plant can compete and survive in the market, as we are seeing with the nuclear plants being decommissioned or needing bailouts. When you calculate the all-in cost/MWh needed to break-even (including maintence, depreciation, power plant security, etc) nuclear is by far more expensive than wind, solar, or gas. It's not even close.

Pay attention to the markets, see where people are successfully investing their money: gas, wind, and solar. The new nuclear plants that are being built in Georgia and South Carolina are coming in waaay over budget and behind schedule, and with Westinghouse's bankruptcy looming they might never get finished.

Re: It's just too expensive

[vyvepe]

Well, thanks to the internet and Google, you found something which is not about electricity prices in Slovakia.
I already admitted that it can be different in other countries. Sun does not shine everywhere the same.

Re: It's just too expensive

[mspohr]

Local prices for electricity are influenced by a lot of political and regulatory factors which go far beyond the "cost" of electricity.
Slovakia has renewable potential generation (and costs) similar to much of the rest of the world. Whether they take advantage of it is a political and regulatory outcome. A lot has to do with the entrenched fossil fuel interests who want to keep their outdated infrastructure sunk costs producing.
(I just read an article about idle coal plants in China and India which have dropping utilization due to high costs, lower energy use and lower costs of renewables. Coal plant utilization rates are about 50% now and have been dropping for 5 years.)

Re: It's just too expensive

[vyvepe]

Coal is expensive in Slovakia too. Almost all of the other part of the "system fee" (which is not spent on subsidizing solar) is spent on subsidizing coal. Coal is better than solar but worse than nuclear based on the data in the invoice. The invoice states that 13% of electricity is from coal. The coal subsidy is smaller than half of the "system fee". Let's say it is 0.4 (just a guess to get some idea how it may look like, I only know for sure that it is less than half of the "system fee"). Therefore, based on the invoice, the coal subsidy compared to the nuclear subsidy is about (8.459*0.4/13) / (3.852/53) = 3.6 time bigger.
Anyway, the subsidized coal power plant is going to be shut down. That is good.

Re:It's just too expensive

[speedplane]

Westinghouse just filed for bankruptcy. There have been barely any fission reactors that have come online in the last few decades in the US. Fission is going nowhere fast.
While fusion may be safer from a meltdown, its so complex that it will likely be far more expensive than fission. Even if we created net energy with fusion tomorrow, we'd still be decades from seeing it in the marketplce.

Re:Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"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.

[ASDFnz]

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.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[slashdot_commentator]

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.

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.

[dbIII]

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.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Ranbot]

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.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[rtb61]

The big problem is nuclear energy got critically over engineered by engineering geeks. They completely fucked up the design of nuclear reactors trying to extract as much energy as possible as fast as possible, as a result designing in high risk, lack of durability and high maintenance cost. Proper nuclear energy design, should be all about trickling out energy over an extended periods of time, so smaller low energy reactors generating low levels of power (relatively speaking) over a hugely extended periods of time (fuel lasting decades even centuries rather than years, less disposal hassles to boot). For the car analogy, they got a massive hard on for super high performance at the edge of the envelope racing cars, when they should have been designing a slow long life farm tractor. A complete fuck up from the get go. You can even tweak solar panel design to be compatible with high radiation levels from nuclear sources, the problem being break down of the panel, at the moment (nuclear power stations should have been designed around hundreds of low energy output reactors, rather that a few running on the edge of collapse, waiting to melt down). Engineers can be real ass clown geeks if you let them get out of control and they did.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[khallow]

Or we could, you know, build clean garbage incineration units like they have in Europe which are actually net producers of energy.

Coal burning is actually a net producer of energy too. And if burning trash "cleanly" is so awesome as a power source, then why not dig up some of our monstrous trash heaps and burn those? Cleanly, of course.

BRB I need to throw some batteries away. /s

Re: "Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[cyber-vandal]

People are irrationally afraid of a power generation method that, if it fucks up, can render a large area uninhabitable and produces waste so toxic that it needs to be buried in concrete for hundreds of years.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[dbIII]

trying to extract as much energy as possible as fast as possible

Considering how expensive various bits of the process are whether you are aiming for a trickle or a flood the only thing that comes anywhere in the ballpark of economic sense is to get as much as you can out of it.
Those low power nuclear solutions used in satellites etc still have incredibly expensive to produce fuel. It may be worth getting at least a high school level understanding of the topic before saying "Engineers can be real ass clown geeks".

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.

[Joce640k]

Bullshit. Nuclear power is economically unsustainable without direct government intervention and subsidy.

That's mostly because of all the NIMBYs who manage to add 20 years of delay to any nuclear power construction job.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the economics of nuclear.

https://encrypted.google.com/s...

This is why nuclear power stations should be built by governments - because they don't have to use the profits to pay back venture capitalists who invested billions 25 years ago on the promise of a 10000% return on their money (and that's conservative - 25 years at 20% interest - they probably ask for more than that).

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[tinkerton]

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.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineers weren't at fault; the LWR was a fine design for a submarine reactor. However, it was never intended to be scaled up to large sizes, and Alvin Weinberg warned about precisely the accidents that we have since experienced. That didn't go over well. Instead of heeding the warnings of the inventor of the technology, a foolish politician had him canned and cancelled the highly successful molten salt reactor program, which was (and is) ideal for generating power with exceptional safety and efficiency.

The LWR extracts ~0.5% of the energy of mined uranium, so your complaints about engineers are doubly misplaced. They didn't want it, and engineering it at a stupidly large size was not trivial. The MSR is the machine that would have delivered the efficiencies that you are belittling.

Re: "Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[drinkypoo]

Our current oil industry is economically unsustainable without direct government intervention.

What a coincidence! It's also ecologically unsustainable without direct massive intervention. We have to figure out how to fix the carbon or we are surely boned.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[budgenator]

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.

Depending on what happens in Bankruptcy Court, that may never happen, Westinghouse was major manufacturer of Gen III and Gen III+ reactors.

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.

[swillden]

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.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[jimtheowl]

Not that I'm happy with Fukushima Daiichi, but to talk about ignorance while promoting coal as a better health risk is a little rich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[losfromla]

Are these _clean_ incinerators though? I meant to underline the clean part but forgot in my original post. From what I'd heard, the _clean_ type incinerators were not permitted in the US because 'murica! Hoo-Rah!

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[losfromla]

Or course it is but it pollutes the environment, destroys mountains, rivers, the air...
Coal should stay in the ground where it does the least harm.
If possible we should definitely work down our enormous trash heaps, maybe even go and get all (most, what we can in any case) the plastic out of the ocean and incinerate that too.

Re: "Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: "Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[cyber-vandal]

If you think a long planned hydro dam is remotely equivalent to something like Fukushima then you are the one in need of an education.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[medoc]

Don't be shy, please name them.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[Ranbot]

Without knowing your definition of "clean" I can't really answer the question. It's impossible to have incineration without creating carbon byproducts. But you can read about the Philadelphia trash to steam plant here:
http://www.pottsmerc.com/artic...

Note the article says that 40 percent of the cost of building the incinerators is environmental controls (e.g. air scrubbers, filters, ash collection, etc.) and they have no visible emissions. They claim the carbon that does escape is cleaner and off-set by eliminating more climate-potent methane the trash would have generated in a landfill. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if European "clean" incinerations are basing their claims on similar logic/calculations. Also, anecdotally I can tell you the Philadelphia plant is in suburban area with neighbors that would not accept an old-fashioned soot-spewing furnace.

The article also notes that Covanta Energy owns/operates 42 waste to energy plants across the US, so there are plenty more examples beyond the one I gave.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[losfromla]

Thanks for the link I will definitely investigate that, from its description it definitely sounds like we are moving in a generally good direction. Dare I say progressive? I know some regressive folks are triggered by the word, I figure that's their problem.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[rtb61]

All down to design and engineers always do it. Over engineer everything they touch, it's just the way it is. Engineering geeks are just typical geeks, give them a free hand and they get carried away. Wow, talk about super sensitive, you wouldn't be an engineer by any chance ;P.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[dbIII]

Overgeneralise all the time and make up shit - that's just the way it is with those clueless political interns chosen only for their looks? Are you one of those by any chance?
BTW, if you had paid attention in high school you wouldn't have made the stupid trickle charge nuke suggestion, you don't have to be an engineer or even have taken a high school physics subject to get a very rough idea of how nuclear power works.


As for overdesign, very heavy aircraft don't fly so that's one incredibly obvious example of it not being "just the way it is".

Re: "Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[catprog]

Even fish?

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[khallow]

Coal should stay in the ground where it does the least harm.

And the least good. We can't make rational decisions by only considering exclusively the cost xor benefits of a choice.

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[carvalhao]

Please do name a single country that can work fully renewable. And yes, I am from Portugal that has claimed to go fully renewable for a couple of days. Try to keep baseload with renewable alone...

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[losfromla]

Coal should stay in the ground where it does the least harm.

And the least good. We can't make rational decisions by only considering exclusively the cost xor benefits of a choice.

Really? We can't make rational decisions by considering cost vs benefits of a choice? That is absolutely the best way to make rational decisions so long as the usual bs move of externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts isn't how we carry them out. As long as all costs are considered, then cost vs benefits is the only way to make a choice.
What would you propose we use a basis for decision making? Coin flip? Pray to the invisible hand of the market? Some other bullshit god?

Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient.

[khallow]

We can't make rational decisions by considering cost vs benefits of a choice? That is absolutely the best way to make rational decisions so long as the usual bs move of externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts isn't how we carry them out. As long as all costs are considered, then cost vs benefits is the only way to make a choice.

Wow, that's pretty broken. In other words, you only consider the costs of "externalizing environmental, societal, and future impacts" which is exactly the problem I was speaking of.

Ignoring the opportunity costs of a choice is not least harm. The reason we burn coal in the first place is because it is useful to do so. And that utility also generates externalities, but of the positive sort.

What would you propose we use a basis for decision making? Coin flip? Pray to the invisible hand of the market? Some other bullshit god?

Externalities are easy to engineer for. Just stick in some revenue-neutral tax on coal or whatever. Just be careful to avoid excessive costs because of a quasi-religious conviction that coal burning is bad. Past that, markets. Problem solved.

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:Economics wins again

[PPH]

Umm. You put a natural gas power plant near the pipeline and then put the power on the transmission grid. Same with coal, hydropower or nuclear. The power grid makes location a non-issue.

Well, we are getting solar

[Anonymous Coward]

power from space now, like Solaren promised we'd have by 2016, right??

Re: Well, we are getting solar

[Anonymous Coward]

My HOA wont let me put shit on my roof. So i put my solar panels indoors and use my weed growing lights to power them.

Re:Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[PPH]

The Russians own our Uranium

Canada and Australia are major producers. And what do you mean by "our" uranium? It's not ours until we buy it.

Systemic management failure

[losfromla]

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.

So, out of everything they could have gotten wrong: labor, equipment, and components, +schedule, they managed to get it all wrong. We're talking about a systemic failure across the board. WTF is wrong with these people? I shudder to think what would happen if these clowns ever brought a reactor online, probably a meltdown within six months. Maybe the orange clown will ease regulations to facilitate these wizards of business failure bringing their shitty plans to fruition, maybe we'll get lucky and have four meltdowns all at the same time. The bonus there would be a lot of orange animals, people, and shrubbery, making the cheeto messiah feel right at home.

Re:Systemic management failure

[Orgasmatron]

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...

They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.

Re:Systemic management failure

[losfromla]

I see what you mean. Thanks for the link, that was very informative. It makes sense that there would be a back-story to something that at first glance was a fuck-up of epic proportions. That sort-of restores my faith in my fellow engineers. Nuclear plants need much better marketers apparently, someone ain't selling them well to the community, and "The Simpsons" doesn't help either.

Re:Systemic management failure

[Orgasmatron]

argumentum ad hominem. Is that you, mdsolar?

It was bound to happen

[cheesybagel]

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.

Re:It was bound to happen

[slashdot_commentator]

The Chinese don't have a lot of natural gas, unlike the USA,

Any place where there are large coal deposits, there are exploitable natural gas deposits. The Chinese are also implementing an experimental MSR power plant, and provided its commercially feasible, will probably be the future model of nuclear reactors in China; not older, breeder reactor designs.

Re:It was bound to happen

[Chas]

Wow! Yet again with the dumbass revisionist history...

The reactor houses in the Fukushima reactors didn't go anywhere during a storm or during the earthquake.
Indeed, all the reactors went into shutdown mode properly and began cooling off.

The problem was the tsunami afterwards which flooded out poorly placed backup generators.
And, had TEPCO (not Westinghouse) followed their site engineers' directions and built a better sea wall, NOTHING WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

Re:It was bound to happen

[cheesybagel]

Any place where there are large coal deposits, there are exploitable natural gas deposits.

Even if that was true, the coal deposits are in the north of the country. It would be useful for Beijing, but not for the large cities in the south. Natural gas needs to either be piped or converted to LNG and transported and that's expensive. The Russians are also planning to build the Altai natural gas pipeline in the North of China to Manchuria I believe, but it's not going to be ready any time soon.

The Chinese are also implementing an experimental MSR power plant, and provided its commercially feasible, will probably be the future model of nuclear reactors in China; not older, breeder reactor designs.

Uh... you mean PBR (Pebble Bed Reactor) instead of LWR (Liquid Water Reactor)? I don't think so. People have been working on that for decades. It isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Re:It was bound to happen

[cheesybagel]

PS: Oh you meant a Molten Salt Fast Breeder Reactor. Well those aren't exactly a done technology either. The Russians are arguably more advanced in that regard.

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.

Re:It was bound to happen

[Chas]

Ah, now the moving goalposts.

And who the fuck are YOU to declare such a reactor is "unsafe"?

Oh that's right, you're just a random armchair nuclear physicist on the internet.

Re:It was bound to happen

[drinkypoo]

Ah, now the moving goalposts.

Logical fallacies, how do they work?!!? Not like you imagine. My standard has long been that if a reactor can't scram without external power, it is garbage. If you can't handle that different members of the Slashdot community may have differing standards, perhaps Slashdot is not for you.

And who the fuck are YOU to declare such a reactor is "unsafe"?

Someone who is paying attention. Why don't you pull your head out of the warm, dark place you've been hiding it, and take a look around?

Re:It was bound to happen

[budgenator]

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.

Westinghouses AP 600 and AP1000 have a passive cooling system which will activate without operator intervention if necessary, requires no external power, can cool the reactor for 72 hours without power and can be replenished.

Re:It was bound to happen

[Chas]

Translation. You're some armchair quarterback commenting on something you have no real experience with.

You should have just been honest and said that up front.

Re:It was bound to happen

[drinkypoo]

Translation. You're some armchair quarterback commenting on something you have no real experience with.

We all have real experience with it now, thanks to assorted nuclear disasters.

You should have just been honest and said that up front.

You wouldn't know honestly if it crawled up your ass and died. Which is apparently approximately what happened to you.

Re:Economics wins again

[cheesybagel]

You seem to think it is cheap to build high capacity power lines. It isn't. In fact its more expensive than to build a natural gas pipeline to transfer the same amount of energy.

Re:Economics wins again

[PPH]

In fact its more expensive than to build a natural gas pipeline

[citation needed]

I've done some engineering on HV transmission lines. They are not that expensive. About $250K per mile back in my day. Natural gas pipelines cost about a million a mile IIRC.

Re:Economics wins again

[cheesybagel]

Power lines have more transmission losses and worse energy density than a natural gas pipeline.

Re: Economics wins again

[PopeRatzo]

I think he may have been using voice-to-text.

Re:Economics wins again

[Ranbot]

Umm. You put a natural gas power plant near the pipeline and then put the power on the transmission grid. Same with coal, hydropower or nuclear. The power grid makes location a non-issue.

As usual, when someone gives a simple answer it's often wrong. We have a power grid that spans the country already and here's a map of it: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/...
But, transmission loss over distance is a very real thing that destroys efficiency and forces regions to have their own "local" power sources. So the source of electricity in the grid is vastly different depending on what region or state you are in. Here's a breakdown of the source of each US state's power grid: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/...

Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[joe_frisch]

Its difficult to imagine a fusion plant being less expensive to build or operate than a fission plant. Even if we can figure out how to get net energy gain from fusion it may never make economic sense.

Its too bad, I wanted a nuclear powered future, with fission gradually being replaced by fusion of the next century. Doesn't look likely.

Nuclear has great potential in long distance spacecraft propulsion, but it just doesn't look very economically practical for terrestrial use.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[Chas]

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.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[joe_frisch]

I thought that and have been a fan of nuclear for a long time, but its starting to look like renewables will end up being cheaper.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[dunkelfalke]

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.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[drinkypoo]

Its difficult to imagine a fusion plant being less expensive to build or operate than a fission plant. Even if we can figure out how to get net energy gain from fusion it may never make economic sense.

When you take into account the difference in decommissioning costs, you win. Unless your plan is to continue to push those costs off onto The People.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[Chas]

So long as the non-renewables they're made of hold out.

Re:Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion

[Chas]

So, you're trying to tell me that shitty construction quality is the reason that Nuclear Power, IN GENERAL, isn't feasible?

And yeah, Germany's divesting itself of nuclear. Then again, they're also cuddling up to how many economic migrants in an attempt to appear "accepting" and divest themselves of their racist past. At the cost of their populace being diluted, their women and children raped, and their general way of life being destroyed as accomodation methods.

And, because one former engineer now spouts off about how bad something is, I should just "accept"? Right?

You were saying something about conspiracies?

Re:Economics wins again

[PPH]

Power lines have more transmission losses

Maybe. But the increased capital cost to improve the line efficiency isn't worth the effort. And it's pretty cheap to increase power line efficiency. Double the voltage and the power loss goes down by a factor of four.

and worse energy density than a natural gas pipeline.

That doesn't make sense. We built a combined cycle natural gas plant. The pipeline in cost about a million a mile. The transmission line out was about a quarter of that. Figuring a 50% efficiency, the gas line was twice as expensive as the power line.

Re:Solar is much more profitable

[slashdot_commentator]

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).

Self inflicted

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Self inflicted

[AmiMoJo]

The market for nuclear in China dried up years ago with Fukushima. It's not the tech, it's the cost and risk.

Re:Self inflicted

[dbIII]

The market for nuclear in China dried up years ago with Fukushima. It's not the tech, it's the cost and risk.

This seems to disagree but it may be baised:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
They just don't seem to be buying much stuff from Westinghouse that may as well be second hand from Fukushima (the AP1000 may as well be a 1970s design).
The energy policy of China at the moment appears to be to get a few of everything including nukes. Both cost and risk have lower priorities than in the west.

Re:Self inflicted

[hey!]

Well, financially speaking bankruptcy doesn't happen because you don't make profit. It happens because you run out of cash flow to meet your current obligations.

Had Westinghouse back in the 90s gone all-in on a fuel cycle it had no practical experience with, it would be pretty much where it is today: building the first power plants of a new design, after a multi-decade hiatus in commissioning nuclear power plants. Either way it's a recipe for construction delays, which equal cost overruns without corresponding new revenue, which equals bankruptcy.

The only way to get a large-scale nuclear power plant business off the ground is to have vast quantities of cash on hand, which businesses don't like to do because keeping cash relatively idle costs money too.

Re:Self inflicted

[AmiMoJo]

world-nuclear.org is the industry propaganda arm, it's untrustworthy. Wikipedia has a reasonable article. Basically since Fukushima the plans have been massively scaled back, to the point where no new plants are being approved now and they are just finishing the ones they have.

In any case, Westinghouse would probably have had a hard time getting business in China. The US has been making a lot of noise about not trusting Chinese technology, and China has been reciprocating. I mean, after Snowden and the cyber attack on Iran, if you were China would you buy US designed nuclear technology?

On track long before then

[dbIII]

Spending more on PR than R&D for a couple of decades and sacking most of the people who know how to design reactors was a bad idea.

Nuclear costs more to make safe

[rsilvergun]

and so long as that's true I'll be against it. With any Nuclear power plant you're gonna have massive maintenance costs and a conga line of capitalists ready to promise the free market will lower those costs. Then they'll do what they did in Fukushima: Ignore maintenance and run the plants far beyond their lifecycle until a disaster blows up in their faces. And they'll get away scott free because nobody nowhere anywhere every hold the wealthy accountable (and no, the Fukushima folks haven't been held accountable; 6 years and counting. And no, a few inquires that are going precisely nowhere don't count).

Find a way to get people to oppose privatization of public resources or a way to make it cheaper to run a safe plant than an unsafe one. Until then Nuclear can go suck eggs.

Re:Nuclear costs more to make safe

[yodleboy]

"Ignore maintenance and run the plants far beyond their lifecycle"

Which is a direct consequence of fear mongering anti nuclear people making it damn near impossible to get a new plant built. They want cheap power, but they oppose too much wind because birds, they oppose coal because pollution, they oppose gas because fracking, they oppose solar because toxic manufacturing. Then they place so much regulation and demands for 100% safety from the only other viable option (nuclear), that it's a financial disaster for any company that dares to take a risk on a 10-20 year project. Yet there's a tacit approval by the same people to keep running old reactors because god forbid we shut them down and MY electricity rate goes up x%.

Sometimes I think these people are as insidious and as harmful as anything from ISIS.

Re:Economics wins again

[dbIII]

You seem to think it is cheap to build high capacity power lines. It isn't

Isn't it lucky that we already have a lot of them and that more are being built all of the time.

Re:Economics wins again

[dbIII]

Look up HVDC. It is on wikipedia now.

Re:Economics wins again

[dbIII]

But, transmission loss over distance is a very real thing

HVDC has become a "real thing" since you went to school (or it was under the radar of your teachers). It's not just computers that have progressed.

Re: Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[tgrigsby]

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.

Re: Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[PatientZero]

Please stop using the word "facts" when responding to right-wing trolls as it triggers their delicate sensibilities. Trolls require a safe space to protect themselves from their own snowflake's sharp corners.

Re: Economics wins again

[dunkelfalke]

You do realise that natural gas pipelines basically use jet engines to pump that gas?

Cheap energy

[tinkerton]

Several interesting things in this article but I'll just mention the part about shale.
A few years back the story was peak oil and we were going to have a major energy crisis. With the prospect of more expensive energy shale became more interesting but at the same time everyone else was also looking at other sources of energy, renewable and other, and other things happened, like Iran's oil becoming more available. And now we have low oil prices over an extended period of time. Shale is not the cause of the nuclear energy glut, it's one of the victims. Shale can only be viable if energy cost is high enough.

As for the future of nuclear power, it's been going downhill since the eighties. Western nuclear energy got a severe blow with Chernobyl and after Fukushima western nuclear energy is dead. In the far east, mainly China it's got a future.

Re:Cheap energy

[dwillden]

On the ropes, but not dead. There are a few plants in the works. For example, one entirely new plant in Eastern Utah, the Blue Castle Project, is slowly but quietly grinding through the approval and design process.

Trump And Polution

[JimSadler]

Did Trump by allowing more carbon pollution cause the nuclear sites to be less than competitive? Did he just cost a lot of workers their jobs?

Re:Economics wins again

[silentcoder]

Gas pipelines don't suffer transmission losses.

Re:Economics wins again

[silentcoder]

What ? You think DC lines don't have losses ?

DC lines are cheaper because they need less wires - you can use the ground as a return wire, and a lighter, smaller cable can carry power over the same distance. There's a downside though - anything generator by a dynamo (that's basically everything except solar) generates AC. So to use DC you have to build rectifiers on one end and then put an alternator on the other end to make it useful to all the AC based tech you want to power. That adds a (huge) cost, so HVDC only makes sense over long enough distances that the savings in cabling exceed the new costs in conversion. HVDC isn't that new anyway. The line between the Cabora-Bassa hydropower station in Mozambique and Johannesburg in South Africa is an HVDC line and that was built in the 1990s.

But HVDC still has losses because the main cause of losses is the fact that conductors have resistance. We're a LONG way from superconductors that are cheap enough to build lossless long-range powerlines out off. Just the cooling for current ones would make it prohibitively expensive. Frankly it's unlikely that will ever happen - we've had a hundred years of designing grids around mostly using relatively nearby power sources. The only way it would make sense to go build a line like that is if you discovered some kind of power generator that produced enough power for the whole world at near-zero cost, but it only worked in one place (yeah, I'm not even going to guess what that might be).

Except it usually is their fault.

[Anonymous Coward]

They get blamed for what they DID do. The fact that they DID do fuckups doesn't mean it's Obama's fault, nor that it's political partisanship that you engage in therefore project onto all others to make you feel less like a shithole at play.

When Bush fucks up, he fucked up. Get over it and stop going "Oh, you're just blaming the opposition of your politics!".

Sorry for the stupid joke...

[DrYak]

Hillary shares responsibility starting from the day she first had sex with Bill Clinton

...but I thaugh Monica was the one having "not sex" with him ?

Perfect is the enemy of the good

[dbIII]

How about you read about the magnitude of those losses (clue: it is not large)and then you'll get a bit of an idea about what is being discussed. There is no need to go off into a tangent about discussing superconductors and pretending a failure there means losses are a total showstopper for any sort of long distance transmission, take a look at what is already being used. Generators do not have to be right next to major cities to be viable.

HVDC isn't that new anyway

Yes. Perhaps you should find out more and you will know why I mentioned it. There is no point attempting to lecture somebody on a topic that they have mentioned when you know very little about the topic yourself, it tends to annoy a great deal. Please take another look at wherever you pasted some text from.

Re: Perfect is the enemy of the good

[silentcoder]

Actually I was quoting my dad... an engineer who designs power grids for a living.
Pretending HVDC is some magic bullet that makes long range transmission a non issue is just silly. Like all engineering problems power grid design is a taking series of trade offs and constructing the solution which solves the specific scenario in the most efficient and economical way. Whether that is long range or local, ac or dc, solar or gas or coal or wind, overhead or underground... these questions never have one right answer. The best answer for this grid will be a unique combination of answers to those and other questions. Finding the best combination of answers for a particular location is what they pay him the big bucks for.

Re: Perfect is the enemy of the good

[dbIII]

Actually I was quoting my dad... an engineer who designs power grids for a living.

Yes I have an uncle who did that for around fifty years but I do not pretend to speak for him, I'm speaking for myself with only a few years experience in the electricity industry and a couple of decades elsewhere - but really we are discussing this at high school level anyway so you should be able to stand on your own two feet here.

Pretending HVDC is some magic bullet

I did not do that. I suggested you consider what the losses actually are. Perhaps you should read the subject heading since you appear to have missed it. I put it there in an attempt to make it more clear that I was not suggesting some not yet existing perfect magic bullet like your superconductor strawman.

It was also extremely offensive when you got this portion of mountain out of the tiny molehill "if you discovered some kind of power generator that produced enough power for the whole world at near-zero cost, but it only worked in one place (yeah, I'm not even going to guess what that might be)"
WTF is it with that attack? All I did is mention something that has less losses than the average coder thinks are in electricity transmission. Why build your mountain out of that molehill?

Re: Perfect is the enemy of the good

[silentcoder]

I made no attacks whatsoever, and there was certainly nothing personal about my speculating about what kind of conditions may justify the cost factors for building a lossless transmission system. It was just idle speculation and it, like the mention of superconductors, was not my key point -just a tangential thought I found interesting.

Yes, I'm aware that the losses for HVDC is significantly less than for AC. I'm also aware that a gas-pipeline is not actually lossless since it costs energy to run the pumps and the longer the pipeline the more energy you have to spend moving the gas around. In the vast majority of cases (indeed all the situations I can imagine) though, the losses on the latter are hugely smaller than on the former.

We do build long-range power-lines. The Cabora-Bassa line I mentioned does exist, and it's quite long. As in - you need an airplane to get from one end to the other in under a week long. But it's a fraction of the length of some of the gas pipelines out there. We build those things to connect different CONTINENTS to each other. I'm not aware of a single transcontinental power-transmission line anywhere in the world, let alone an intercontinental one.

"Long" is a relative term - what is "long" in a "long range power line" is really "not very long at all" in the world of gas pipelines.

Re: Perfect is the enemy of the good

[budgenator]

In HVAC the inductive impedance is much more significant than the resistance, the AC also needs about 23% more peak voltage and amperage to achieve the same KVA as HVDC would. Where HVDC really shines is connecting to grids with slightly different phases. Wind turbines have alternators that output AC, but that is converted to DC, then inverted back to AC in sync with the power grid. If the rectifier bridges in switching power supplies were beefed up, they'd be able to run on anything from 110 - 240 volts, AC or DC.

Re:Economics wins again

[drinkypoo]

Power lines have more transmission losses

The total losses in transmission in the USA are less than five percent. It's worth it just to avoid having a pipeline, let alone to save the cost of building a pipeline.

That's OK you can build coal stations

[Maritz]

Just build coal stations. AGW is a chinese/hippy illuminati conspiracy anyway (delete as appropriate). Coal makes more radioactive waste than nuclear so you don't even have to miss out on radioactive pollutants. It's a win/win.

Re:Nuclear?

[budgenator]

Coal is dying, it's was more a matter of Trump allowing a graceful natural death or Obama's accelerated forced death.

Re:Trash isn't fossil CO2.

[budgenator]

Don't know if you know this, but coal is buried carbon deposits from millions of years ago.

In other words, natural trash.

2,385km is not long?

[dbIII]

I made no attacks whatsoever

Not only did you ignore the subject you've now ignored what I quoted.
Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if you had ignored my post above entirely instead of jumping on it in some attempt to prove your superiority.

s really "not very long at all" in the world of gas pipelines

Take a look at the wikipedia article on HVDC or ask your Dad. A distance of 2,385km seems to be very long to me.

Re:2,385km is not long?

[silentcoder]

The west-east gas-pipeline is over 4000km. That's rather more than 2,385km - in fact it's nearly twice as much. That pipeline is currently being extended -when phase 2 is completed it will be close to 9000km long. There are two more phases planned after that, but their exact end-points haven't been finalized so no idea how much longer it would be. But even if they just add as much as phase II does, that would bring us to over 15000km

Oh what a pity that apparently no engineers in China had heard of HVDC...

Like I said- "long" is relative. 2,385km is, indeed, seriously long for a powerline. But it's really not impressive next to what we can do with gas lines.

Transmission losses

[fyngyrz]

Gas pipelines don't suffer transmission losses.

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.

Re:Now you are getting ridiculous

[silentcoder]

Why would I need to "accept" a point I never argued AGAINST ? The fact is that whether it is better to bring the gas closer and build a nearby generator or build a generator near the gas and run a long line doesn't have ONE answer. It depends entirely on the specifics of the situation.
What's the terain like between the gas and the town ? It's generally easier and cheaper to run a line over a mountain than a pipe. How far apart are they ? Too far and a pipeline will beat a transmission line every time.

And that has been my point all along. Sometimes - it will be better to run a line, sometimes it will be better to lay a pipe - and sometimes it will be better to send the gas somewhere else and use some other resource to service this particular town.

Re:A great man turns in his grave... apk

[budgenator]

Mr Westinghouse also invented the Air Brake, without that all of our trains and heavy trucks would run away and crash.

Re:Now you are getting ridiculous

[dbIII]

Sometimes - it will be better to run a line, sometimes it will be better to lay a pipe

With the greatest possible respect that choice is not going to be considered if all the gas is going to do is run a generator. A pipeline is a vastly more difficult project than a transmission line.
I really do not get why you decided to jump on my post and also decided to make cracks about me needing to invent perfect stuff with zero losses.

Re: Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru

[Outta_the_way_peck!]

Then they should have stayed under the bridge.

Re:Trash isn't fossil CO2.

[gnick]

One man's trash...

The thing about multi-nationals

[dbIII]

after a multi-decade hiatus in commissioning nuclear power plants

The thing about multi-national companies is that they can do stuff in other places even if no nukes are getting built in the US.

Re: Nuclear?

[WindBourne]

O did not accelerate. Nothing he has done has impacted coal one way or another.