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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.
Westinghouse took a huge risk when they bought the CB&I Stone and Webster construction company that was building the reactors in the USA. They didn't examine their accounts properly and the construction company was hiding huge debts. Since Toshiba bought Westinghouse, to get the AP1000 reactor design, they inherited that financial burden. Given the news from Toshiba last year you had to know the shakedown at Westinghouse would come eventually. Toshiba bet a lot on this deal and they lost tremendously. This will setback nuclear power R&D in the West for like a decade at least.
The nuclear reactors in the USA are being built under a fixed price contract. With all the changes that were required to the design, because of regulation changes, plus the fact that no one had built a lot of new reactors in the USA in decades, meant there was a high risk with a deal like that. Couple that with the oil price and natural gas price crashes and the deal is pretty bad. They probably thought they would recoup the losses with further reactor construction in the USA in the future once these initial reactors were built and their licensing was done and construction knowledge improved but there's little chance of it happening anymore.
Still there are going to be like four reactors of this same AP1000 design going online in China this year at two locations. Plus the Chinese already have a license to build an enlarged version of it they call the CAP1400 for which they intend to do serial production in relatively large amounts. So even if these are the last AP1000 reactors to be build in the USA, construction of the licensed designs will continue in China. The Chinese don't have a lot of natural gas, unlike the USA, and given the air pollution issues they have in their large coastal cities, they have few alternatives to nuclear if they want to reduce atmospheric pollution.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl...
They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.
See that "Preview" button?
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.