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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.
Nuclear power has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter"
Everything (coal, gas, wind, solar) is cheaper than nuclear.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
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
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...
They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.
See that "Preview" button?
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.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nuclear power is needed because wind power, solar power, and hydro power alone are insufficient to meet the world's demand for electricity.
Even if lefties don't like to admit it, the reality is that nuclear power is one of the most effective and efficient ways of generating large amounts of electrical power.
Bullshit. Nuclear power is economically unsustainable without direct government intervention and subsidy. The only thing notable about nuclear power is that it doesn't require utilizing "fossilized carbon" in order to produce its relatively large and "dangerous" power.
And mind you, I am actually a supporter of nuclear power subsidization by the federal gov't. But 1950's technology should not be propagated or even used to replace old nuclear reactors. There should be a working model for non-fissile (thorium) nuclear reactors which then can be propagated commercially, modern designs that make nuclear meltdowns near impossible, and a sustainable program to reprocess and safely dispose of nuclear waste.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
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.
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.
Ah, another Infowars/Fox "News" fan. A mining operation owned by Russian company has rights to mine a percentage of the uranium in our country -- which they then must sell to the U.S.
Please get you facts straight.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
The 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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
/s
BRB I need to throw some batteries away.
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.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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".
"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.
Sure they do. Significant energy is required to pump the gas; that energy is lost in the process. There's no free lunch to be had just because gas moves in a pipeline. Same goes for oil.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.