Finland's Nuclear Plant Start Delayed Again 130
mdsolar writes with news about further delays to Finland's Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor. "Areva-Siemens, the consortium building Finland's biggest nuclear reactor, said on Monday the start date of the much delayed project will be pushed back to late 2018 — almost a decade later than originally planned. Areva-Siemens blamed disagreements with its client Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) over the plant's automation system, the latest blow for a project that has been hit by repeated delays, soaring costs and disputes. "The delays are because the planning of the plant has taken needlessly long," Jouni Silvennoinen, TVO's project head, told Reuters on Monday. "We haven't examined the supplier's detailed schedules yet, but our preliminary view is that we could do better (than 2018)."
Re:Indeed... (Score:4, Informative)
Arevas failure (Score:2, Informative)
What happend here is that Areva wanted the deal at any cost, so they agreed to build their prototype reactor cheap with Finnish safety standars (which are very high). the problems started in early stages when they could not produce complete plans to Finnish authorities as their plans were not even finished yet. When Areva got their plans ready they where already a few years late, it was thn discovered that the fail-safe/automation system were not separated well enough, many single-points of failure were discovered and caused further delays as they needed to fix the plans so that the systems fail-safe are autonomus from main systems.
Areva is trying to turn this on TVO (the buyer) by saying the delayes were caused by them not getting the approvals in time, when in reality Areva did not provide complete plans ever when they requested. Abosulte disaster prject and design from Arevas side.
Re:Indeed... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. A glut of unranium putting uranium producers out of business, closing mines, etc. The glut today may well lead to a shortage a few years out from now.
No, because as soon as prices recover, the mines will reopen. There is enough uranium stockpiled to cover the transition. If prices ever go back to where they were in 2010, it will be cost effective to extract uranium from seawater [wikipedia.org], where the supply is almost limitless. At current consumption rates, we will not run out of relatively cheap uranium for thousands of years. There are plenty of reasonable arguments against nuclear energy, but "we are running out of fuel" is not one of them.