French Nuclear Industry In Turmoil As Manufacturer Buckles 384
mdsolar writes with bad news for France and its nuclear industry. "France's nuclear industry is in turmoil after the country's main reactor manufacturer, Areva, reported a loss for 2014 of 4.8 billion euros ($5.3 billion) — more than its entire market value. The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva, which is among the biggest global nuclear technology companies. The loss puts its future — and that of France as a leader in nuclear technology — at risk. Energy and Environment Minister Segolene Royal said Wednesday she asked Areva and utility giant Electricite de France to work together on finding solutions, amid reports of a possible merger or other link-up. The government said in a statement that it's working closely with Areva to restructure and secure financing, and would 'take its responsibility as a shareholder' in future decisions about its direction. Areva reported Wednesday 1 billion euros in losses on three major nuclear projects in Finland and France, among other hits. Areva has lost money for years, in part linked to delays on those projects and to a global pullback from nuclear energy since the 2011 Fukushima accident."
I have said it before (Score:2, Insightful)
And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Re:I have said it before (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.
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That's a simplistic view of the situation. Nuclear translates to specific challenges in design and delivery of facilities due to the dangers of radioactive materials.
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Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.
Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.
How I stopped hating tax and learned to love it (Score:5, Interesting)
Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.
Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.
Bingo, we have winner there. So if governments internalized externalities by charging polluters to pollute, making the price of coal reflect its true cost, then the price of nuclear energy would be more favorable in comparison than now. Without those conditions, we are now all subsidizing the most polluting forms of energy generation, such as coal, by making polluting free.
I know the free market libertarian types will scream bloody murder about the proposal that pollution be taxed, just because it is a tax and they reflexively hate all taxes. But hold on you free market libertarian type people! If the government returned payments from polluters directly to the public in the form of checks, instead of letting the crooks who run our government squander it, then the net tax rate would be zero because the total tax dollars collected from polluters would equal the total tax dollars returned to the public. There is a redistributionary aspect to this tax, and those are typically regarded as a bad because they create price distortions. But in this case it is a good because it corrects, not creates, a price distortion by redistributing dollars away from polluters in proportion to the cost of their polluting.
There is a noteworthy point there: taxation is not a burden. The burden of Government is not taxation but instead spending inefficiency. Consider the following: You can go to the grocery store and pay $2.00 to buy a bag of onions. Alternatively, the government can tax you $2.00 and provide you bag the same bag of onions. The tax payer is rationally indifferent to those alternatives, therefore the tax is not a burden to the tax payer. What makes government a burden is spending inefficiency: In actuality, the government taxes you $2.00 and instead of giving you $2.00 worth onions it buys a tobacco farmer subsidy, anti-marijuana law enforcement, spyware to read your e-mail, and corporate welfare in the form of bad loans to Solyndra or some other boondoggle. What fraction does go to anything which is of value to the public, such as perhaps housing, is filtered through government contractors who capture most of the dollars for themselves and creates unemployment by offering an incentive to not work.
Because the public would pay money for the government not to do some of those things government spending efficiency can be negative. For example, with low government spending efficiency the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $3.00 if the government uses its $2.00 to purchase $1.00 worth of harm to the taxpayer. With high government spending efficiency, the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $-1.00, that is, the tax payer gives up two dollars but gains $3.00. In practice that does not happen. If it did then Wall Street investors would all have been replaced by government bureaucrats, if they can earn that rate of return.
So if the government both taxes pollution and returns the tax revenues to the public as dollars then taxation is not a net social burden. And the reduction in pollution is a net social benefit.
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Ones that will keep my computer running even if it happens to be cloudy and calm and my neighbour decides to use a vacuum cleaner.
Bit players unless there's a near-miraculous breakthrough in battery technology. At which point solar will require lots of land area and wind will likely have unintended side effects - it's removing energy from the weather system, after all - which means endless rounds of complaints.
Workable, but requires massive plants.
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Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just neutron bombardment either. Your fuel is producing almost every element in the periodic table, anisotropically and varying across time. It's pretty much the worst situation one could come up with from a containment standpoint inside the fuel even before you factor in neutron bombardment.
Then there's the nature of nuclear disasters: they're disasters in slow motion. The upside is that few people usually die from them because there's usually plenty of time to get away. The downside is that they take bloody forever and a king's ransom to clean up, where it's even possible. Picture, for example, an accident at Indian Point that would increase NYC residents' rate of cancer over the next 10 years by two to three orders of magnitude. You could evacuate over days to weeks and it'd have little impact on public health. But you'd be having to pay for the loss and cleanup of New York City. That is, of course, an extreme case, but it's an illustration of the financial challenge faced by an industry that deals with large amounts of chemicals that are incredibly toxic even in the minutest quantities. Screwups can turn out to be REALLY BIG screwups.
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Admiral Hyman Rickover (Score:3, Interesting)
...has all nuclear operations problems solved. No real accidents in US Navy nuclear reactor ops so far. And they operate as many reactors as france at one time in much more difficult circumstances.
Compare that to the uniformed fuckers of Britain and Russia. They manage to leak from their reactors all the time. Because they have a relaxed attitude to engineering. Rickover booted the politicos and social engineers out of the USN reactor business. He was much hated for this.
But - Results matter.
Smaller reactors are better. (Score:5, Interesting)
Quote: "Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs. Most are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction."
The Areva design does not have "passive or inherent safety".
Re:Smaller reactors are better. (Score:5, Informative)
> Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have
> greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs
All of these statements are likely true, except that they assume, as the quote notes, "mass production".
Nuclear power economy scales *very* strongly with reactor size. That's why almost all modern reactor designs are around 1 GWe. There are somewhat smaller designs, like CANDU6, but they have been unable to compete with the larger designs in the market.
The *very* small designs, the SMR's that you're referring to, attempt to address this through a modular scale-out. But in order for this to work, you need mass production, hundreds or thousands of modules. Until that time, the price/performance appears to be *terrible*. So everyone's sitting on their hands waiting for someone else to pull the trigger. After decades, no one has.
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The price/performance of nuclear is great. Similar to coal in countries without coal deposits and slightly over coal elsewhere. Coal is the cheapest power generation method but also the dirtiest by far.
The nuclear power plant construction costs have similar economics to hydropower. A large fraction of the cost is with large concrete and steel structure construction. The cost of the reactor itself actually pales in comparison. This is due to a large degree to very strict radiation control measures to prevent
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"
When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Interesting)
And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies, which is global warming. And they're still lower than the costs of switching over to entirely "renewable" technologies which, in the immediate future, would leave a substantial gap between consumption and generation.
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> And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies
Gas plants with CCS cost less than nuclear. Coal with CCS is about the same price.
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Is there a working large scale CCS project to demonstrate the truth of those facts? The only working project I know of are demonstration scale.
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And they're still lower than the costs of fossil fuel based technologies, which is global warming.
I think this viewpoint is incorrect. Society is pretty good at absorbing slow on going costs, like cancer deaths from burning coal and we actually do a pretty good job at addressing things like global warming. We will find a solution to that problem. It might be higher levies and sea walls or it might be some kind of geo engineering. Either way is a slow change we can adapt to.
A nuclear accident on the other hand is a sudden catastrophe that can destroy large areas. Unlike one of those possibly global
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Then learn to live without technology
I agree! Modern medicine and agriculture is sooooo overrated.
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There is no uncertainty in nuclear. There is uncertainty in the support for nuclear, and people's perception of nuclear. This is killing nuclear projects, but I doubt it is killing anything else.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Informative)
Face it: nuclear is expensive.
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Nope, France, UK and even Germany were pro nuclear. They havent had support for nuclear in the recent years. Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment. 'Subsides' for nuclear are usually just low interest loans, which would more than pay off.
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It requires an upfront investment AND an ending investment (after closing the old plants) that's higher than all the upfront investments combined!
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Interesting)
In case of the new British power plant there are not only upfront investments, there is also a guarantee for the power price that is twice the going rate and this guarantee is extended for the whole lifetime of the power plant and will be adjusted for inflation over that time.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment.
And of course, you usually get the public/government to pay for the downstream costs like storage of waste and de-commissioning.
If only it wasn't for those pesky Health and Safety rules, it would be a licence to print money.
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Ever seen a mountain of coal fly ash?
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> Nuclear is not expensive, it requires an upfront investment
LOLZ.
You understand that the vast majority of the LCoE from nuclear is the payments on the construction loans, right? And, so, if it requires an upfront investment, that is, by definition, going to make it expensive.
*How* expensive is another question. That is clearly answered by the 11 Euro/kWh price. In other words "youch, expensive!"
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No one in Europe is "pro nuclear".
The plants we have was built in cold war times by cold war politicians against the will of the population.
All european nations are slowly stepping out of nuclear power, even France. Their percentage of nuclear power dropped from like 85% to like 65% meanwhile, and the replacement is: wind and solar. It is just not big news but easy to google.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
All of Areva's renewables investments combined are less than 10% of their business. And they're performing far better than their core nuclear business. I find it amazing that you argue that they shouldn't have invested in the few projects they're involved in that are actually paying off.
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Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business but from various adventures the former management engaged in (most of them for ego-boosting reasons): trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters, getting swindled when buying uranium mines (again, to bypass it's usual parters), and investing heavily in renewables because it's cool.
tl;dr it's someone else's fault
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> Most of the losses come not from Areva's core business
You're joking right?! Every reactor they are building is over-budget and draining the company's coffers.
> trying to build a reactor in Finland without its usual parters
They're building them in France with their usual partners, and they're just as much a disaster as Finland.
> getting swindled when buying uranium mines
So, bad management. Which is precisely what you want running a company that makes nuclear reactors.
> investing heavily in rene
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
And as far as Olkiluoto, they were simply unprepared to pull off that first of a kind project by themselves, and the Finish supply and regulatory elements faltered as well, a perfect storm of problems. But this is more poor execution than a technology issue. Other plants, including the EPR plants in China, are being completed on a reasonable schedule, more driven by money than anything else.
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I'm more inclined to think it's red tape that costs the most.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
Every reactor will become old tech in a few decades. And people aren't going to change, so they'll continue to build them in awful places.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors.
And from a tech point it's entirely true. In this case it's the politics killing it.
No one wants (politically) to build new nuclear plants. No one wants to build coal plants either. Enough people don't want renewables blotting large areas of the landscape. The energy has to come from somewhere so those old, dirty coal plants and well-past-their-retire-date, old and less safe than new tech nuclear plants keep getting extension after extension because people really don't want blackouts.
The problem here is all politics, not technology.
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"That's exactly what they said when they were building the old reactors."
And compared to the imported coal they replaced, they were right. Every generation of power tech is safer than its predecessors.
Passive cooling != No cooling (Score:3)
Well as an example, the new thorium reactors don't even need cooling as the reaction is cut off immediately when there's a failure.
Thorium reactors don't need cooling? I think you don't understand the physics involved. Some newer reactor designs have passive cooling systems which are (theoretically) safer but they still need and have cooling systems. Fission generates heat which is used to drive turbines. If you have heat you must have a cooling system. It takes a substantial amount of time for a fission reactor to cool even once the reaction is shut down and you have to have some form of cooling system in place to do that.
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My point is the current new tech will be a lot safer and therefore far less expensive as they won't need to factor in the cost of hypothetical catastrophes.
Welcome to Westworld.
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Old tech, new tech - I specifically mentioned obvious flaws in engineering. Specifically, some people had their heads up their asses, and decided to locate those reactors close enough to the shore that a moderately sized tsunami could flood them. No matter the tech level, if the tech is left exposed to the elements, a catastrophe can render that technology useless, or worse.
Engineers are supposed to be intelligent people, right? WTF did they put those plants so close to the water? What would it have cos
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If I were guessing (and I am), I'd guess that the Japanese didn't want the plant anywhere near where people actually lived, so they put it as far away as feasible. Which happened to be on the coast.
Note that a quick check of maps shows that the plant was about as far from the surrounding towns as it was possible to be - inland would have put it clo
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You're better off building a containment wall against flooding and keeping the reactor not too far above the water level.
That's fine too. The problem is building neither. The other problem is not fixing the design that was known to cause hydrogen build-up and explosions that breach containment in any problem scenario.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that's what they're saying over there in Fukishima. "Nuclear is cheap, but this uncertainty is killing us!"
When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukishima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.
you mean the basic engineering error where the project manager wouldn't sign off due to the mistake made in concrete formulation so he was fired and a more lenient approver installed in his place?
Compare the alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
Death per kilowatt, etc.
Many of these nuclear costs are because of irrational fear. If no amount of safety is enough, no amount of spending will be enough.
Nuclear is already far safer than other power generation, including numbers from Fukishima.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/print/ [forbes.com]
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Depends on how you measure "safety". I grew up under the shadow of a coal powered plant. Back in those days, women routinely did their laundry, and hung that wet laundry outside on clothes lines to dry. In the village of West Pittsburgh, Pa, the women DID NOT hang their laundry out, because it would turn black before it dried.
Despite all the evils of that soot and coal dust, gardens were grown, children attended school, dinners were eaten, babies grew into young men and women, and life went on.
Tell me ab
Re:Compare the alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
So, tell me about the number of fatalities associated with coal power. Include coal-mining deaths, since that's the only reason for them.
I note that there was a coal-mining accident in Ukraine the other day. It killed 30 people. Just that one accident.
Chernobyl killed about 60. Over the period since the accident, since that includes thyroid cancer deaths that are estimated to have happened due to the accident.
Oh, and since Chernobyl, the USA alone has suffered in excess of 830 coal mining deaths (in excess because I don't want to find a breakdown of 1986 coal mining deaths by month/day to allow a more exact number. But 1987 to 2014 add up to more than 830 by themselves).
So, coal is definitely safer. It pollutes, it does the CO2 thing, and it kills more people in normal operations that the worst nuclear disaster in history. Yeah, definitely safer...
Oh, and did you know that wildlife in the Chernobyl area is in much better shape than outside the exclusion zone?
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So you count coal mining deaths, but not uranium mining deaths?
Re:Compare the alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
The Ukraine mine had 32 this month. 101 died there in November 2007, 57 more the next month.
I grew up near a nuclear plant. We didn't know it was there except that the restricted building zone near the plant was full of baseball diamonds, beaches and nature trails. No, really.
Re:Compare the alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
Are people living in the Chernobyl area? No? THAT is my point.
so? It's rendered a tract of land uninhabitable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... [wikipedia.org]
I'm not sure anyone's living on top of that mess either, and it's by far the only one. OOh here's a better one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Fun fact: not only is nuclear best in terms of death per kWh, it also renders the least land unusable per kWh generated. And yes that includes all the nuclear accidents.
Basically you're falling into the classic irrationality suffered by lots of people when dealing with nuclear. The events are very, very VERY rare and generally large. That makes them unpredictable (and therefore scary) and large (therefore newsworthy). If a nuclear accident happens anywhere in the world you hear about it.
Humans are generally bad at assessing the risks of rare events. Nuclear events are rare, very newsworthy and "scary" because radation is something out of most people's experience.
That doesn't make your gut feeling correct. Anf for every chernobyl you can point out (which is precisely one), there are hundreds of mining accidents, fly ash accidents, coal seam fires, and so on.
Like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
Have you ever heard about it? Say what you like about Chernobyl, but that accident you've probably not heard of unless you're (a) British and (b) over about 30 killed nearly 3x the number of people as Chernobyl (including cancer deaths).
and anything might happen now.
Well technically yes, but this illustrates my point. You're letting fear of the unknown completely dominate your risk assessments. Just because all the atoms in a box of gas might rush to one end (theoretically possible, statistically unlikely) doesn't mean it is ever likely to happen. So while "anything" might happen, it might still not be likely to happen before the heat death of the universe.
In order for the materials to reach a critical mass, there would have to be something to concentrate them. After that, what would happen is it would get hot (it almost certainly wouldn't even be prompt critical), melt, mix with some molten rock, become diluted and go subcritical again in short order.
As I suggested above - I grew up in coal country.
Yep. Score another one for poor risk assessment on the part of humans. We down-rate risks which are know to us over ones we don't understand. You're used to coal based risks and unused to nuclear based ones, so your assessment of them is way off.
The concerns you bring up are serious, but they are manageable. Chernobyl - not so manageable, huh?
Chernobyl is now pretty much managed. It's sitting there glowing away slowly and otherwise doing very little. They're currently building a new cover to go over it precisely to manage any remaining risks.
Fukishima? That has polluted cubic miles of ocean already, much of it headed toward America's west coast.
Yes we can detect the Fukishima radiation on the West coast. Sounds terrible, eh? Well, no. That actually says more about the astonishing sensitivity of nuclear detectors than it does about Fukishima.
The radation level is 8 disintergrations per cubic meter per second. That's 10 atoms per cubic meter! That amount is phenomenally small and is a testament to the sensitivity of the instruments. It's also far below (about 1%) of the natural background radation of seawater, and far FAR below the level of background radation if you either live at altitude or live on granite or other volcanic substances.
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"Fun fact: not only is nuclear best in terms of death per kWh, it also renders the least land unusable per kWh generated. And yes that includes all the nuclear accidents."
Does that also count all the land from which the fissionables were mined? Several people here are pointing to coal mines, but they make no mention of mining operations that support the nuclear industries.
You claim that Chernobyl is "managed"? In the weeks after the accident, all the management that was possible was performed. Hundreds o
Re:Compare the alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
Does that also count all the land from which the fissionables were mined? Several people here are pointing to coal mines, but they make no mention of mining operations that support the nuclear industries.
Not sure, but given the difference in energy density (6 orders of magnitude IIRC), the stats are not in coal's favour.
You claim that Chernobyl is "managed"?
It is now, yes.
In the weeks after the accident, all the management that was possible was performed.
Yes, and that is a form of management. The GP claimed that it was unmanaged, which is patently false.
. Hundreds of workers sacrificed themselves to dump the concrete on top of the site. Wikipedia isn't the go-to place for information, but you've already used it. Wikipedia will suffice to make my own point.
Uh... for someone quoting wikipedia, you need to actually read it. The "hundreds" you refer to is actually 60.
Today, the only "management" being done, is to man the gates that block access to the exclusion zone.
Apparently they're building a new cover. But so? What extra management needs to be done? Again the GP claimed that it is/was unmanaged. If you need to keep people out, and that's all you need to do and you are doing it then you are managing it.
About sixty dead, huh? I don't accept that, any more than I accept the inflated figures of a million dead.
OK, so a few hundred dead then? What do you accept? Either way, it's still safer than the alternatives by a long way. The UN originally predicted about 4000 deaths due to cancer, but that used a linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure which is looking less and less likely to be correct and seriously overesimates the effect of radiation.
Nonetheless, the numbers are small, very small. And this is the worst ever disaster from a powerplant of a sort never built in the west (strongly positive feedback coefficient) and that no longer exists (all remaining RBMKs have been modified to a much lower void coefficient).
By comparison, the coal industry pollution in the US shortens about 24,000 lives per year of which 2,800 apparently are due to cancer. So, even accepting the enlarged numbers, the total worldwide deaths from the worst ever nuclear accident are around 1/10 of the deaths *per year* in the US alone from coal pollution. And that's ignoring the minors.
So, either way, nuclear is vastly safer than coal. You have to bump the number of deaths quite high before it reaches the safety levels of the next-most-safe which IIRC is either solar or wind.
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I'm not aware of any coal disaster that has rendered an area the size of a state or province uninhabitable.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/... [google.com]
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Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.
Another problem is plans are often overly optimistic to make the costs look good and the actual construction varies form the design due to poor project management, which opens up licensing issues and causes further delays driving up costs. The industry is its own worst enemy in many ways.
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Another problem is plans are often overly optimistic to make the costs look good and the actual construction varies form the design due to poor project management, which opens up licensing issues and causes further delays driving up costs. The industry is its own worst enemy in many ways.
Very true.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
According to Financial Times in December 2014 construction of the Olkiluoto plant has descended into farce as it is currently expected to open nine years late and several billions of euros over budget.[8]
the main problem behind their problems is that they're selling projects at prices they have made up as if cheap movable labor was as efficient as good labor and their prices were not designed for the safety specs necessary AND they didn't even have the fucking design when th
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Nuclear is cheap. Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel or any large scale project. Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects.
Whether you like it or not, energy production is an inherently political subject., and for better or worse, in a democracy the politicians have to take account of public opinion.
It was all a lot easier in the USSR, where there was no criticism of Chernobyl from the happy locals.
Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
> Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf Look at page 11.
> Project delays are not cheap in nuclear, or a dam (hydro if you will) or a tunnel
Too true. But it is also true that reactor construction has a history of going overbudget on average by two times, making it one of the most consistently bad investments in history.
> Uncertain political environment is a death knell for large scale projects
Also very true. Which is why wind and solar are the fastest growing sources of power in history: a large wind farm can go from napkin sketch to pumping electrons in 18 months. Residential PV can be completely installed in 2 weeks. Arranging financing for these projects is akin to arranging a car loan. The $30 billion needed for 5 years for a reactor? Not so easy.
Nuclear is not cheap (Score:3)
Nuclear is cheap.
Nuclear (specifically fission) power generation is cheap. All the safety systems, regulatory oversight, large construction projects, waste management/disposal, licensing, project management, environmental impact, financing and maintenance of nuclear power are tremendously expensive. And you cannot separate the power generation from the rest of those items.
Large Gen III+ reactors require special equipment. (Score:2)
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Re:I have said it before (Score:5, Informative)
Right. Having the government cover all of your major liabilities, getting to write off massive debts, pass all of your cost overruns onto local consumers without them having a say in the manner, and so on, that's all "paying their own way", right? In nuclear power, the gains have always been privatized while the costs and risks socialized. And it's *still* been very difficult to find investors. Nuclear has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.
Here's a paper [ucsusa.org] going into the various massive ways nuclear has been subsidies. And they still can't bloody manage to stay afloat. It's one of the few industries with a negative growth curve - where technology gets more expensive with time, not cheaper.
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Well obviously nuclear should merge with banks.
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Oh and double reply.
Everything (nuclear included) is seemed to expect to just ignore the deaths caused in the process of electricity generation, and the cost of those is completely socalised as always.
The main thing in this case is that nuclear has by far the lowest deaths per kWh of any form of electricity generation. The thing is we use a *lot* of energy. An unimaginably huge amount, and nuclear fuel is really incredibly energy dense.
You either need truly vast scale construction to gather enough solar and
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Most opponents of nuclear power aren't particularly keen on fossil fuel power stations either, you know.
The only long term hope is fusion power, but realistically that's at least a couple of generations away.
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You are creating a false dichotomy between clean, cheap nuclear and dirty, evil coal/gas.
Well, it's not really that false. Currently there's not the manufacturing capacity in the world to make enough windfarms or solar farms and besides there are many countries (such as the UK) which simply couldn't survive off renewables no matter how many we built.
Most opponents of nuclear power aren't particularly keen on fossil fuel power stations either, you know.
Yep, bue they're even less keen on blackouts.
The only lo
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And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.
Compared to what? It's one of the very, very few industries that doesn't get a truly massive subsidy in terms of having its externalities paid for by someone else and never put on the books.
Doesn't? Are you trying to be funny?
The nuclear power industry depends absolutely on government underwriting the unquantified future costs of disposal/storage of radioactive waste and decommissioning power stations.
If you wanted a poster boy for "having its externalities paid for by someone else and never put on the books" a smiling Nuclear Power Baby would be it.
the problem with nuclear power (Score:4, Insightful)
once you have reactors, you're stuck with them for the better part of a century and when shit goes wrong, it goes really wrong.
can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!
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once you have reactors, you're stuck with them for the better part of a century and when shit goes wrong, it goes really wrong.
can we start switching over to solar panels and batteries yet? seriously, we are bombarded by free power every single day!
While solar has promise it faces a similar issue as many other power generation solutions do: NIMBY. People want power from a wall outlet but don't want production facility nearby, whether it's nuclear, coal, wind, solar or what have you.
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And eclipses can be predicted.
Yeah, but what happens if Ming the Merciless starts his attack, huh, buddy?
Nuclear ain't cheap any more. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear used to be cheap when directly connected to military money (and thus to tax money). Now it has to stand more and more on its own feet. I think it just ain't worth the hassle.
Makes me sad for the great French people who have been enticed to over-invest in this dud
Re:Nuclear ain't cheap any more. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's definitely the case that military purposes kept the money rolling in for R&D, pesky questions about safety and storage largely under wraps, purchases of a lot of equipment that could also make plutonium, and some PR-piece "Look at how fuzzy and peaceful nuclear energy can be!" reactor installs at home and in selected friendly-and-not-too-likely-to-change locations abroad.
It's likely that, at the same time, this left the industry largely in the hands of companies that are very, very, good at government contracting; but perhaps a bit shaky on less lucrative and parasitic forms of economic activity.
Where the optimists and the pessimists part ways is the question of whether nuclear energy is in fact just not terribly economic; and so achieved certain unique capabilities for cost insensitive customers, while largely floundering without them; or whether nuclear energy as an industry was wildly distorted by catering exclusively to select cost insensitive customers with substantially different needs than energy production, and simply needs to develop product lines that reflect current requirements.
So far Areva has not delivered anything but delays (Score:4, Interesting)
Olkiluoto 3 was originally supposed to be in commercial production in 2009. Then it was postponed to 2011. Then 2013. And now, at the earliest, perhaps 2015. The whole project schedule has been overly optimistic and there have been numerous quality issues in welding, components and such. Apparently Areva was surprised about the Finnish officials being so strict about the quality guidelines and also failed to deliver all the design documentation to them in time (because in here, you simply don't build shit like this without plans). In 2009 they also threatened to delay the start of the final construction phase until TVO made changes to the contract in favor of Areva.
In 2012 Areva estimated the building costs being around 8,5 billion euros, which is quite a bit more than the shipping price of 3 billion.
So yeah, don't buy nuclear reactors from the French. Or cars for that matter.
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Yes (Score:2)
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I guess they are incompetent because they are having the same trouble with another reactor in France.
For a long time Areva was complaining that TVO, the company that bought the reactor in finland, was not doing everything required and that the safety requirements where somehow wrong, but since they have the same trouble in France with very favourable regulators - they must be incompetent.
The main problem has been to automation system. For the nuclear reactor safety standards, there must be two completely se
Re:So far Areva has not delivered anything but del (Score:4, Interesting)
For the building of a french nuclear plant, the usual workshare is the following: Areva delivers the reactor equipment, while the EDF utility acts as the prime contractor for the construction of the plant.
For Olkiluoto 3, Areva took the lead, and operated as a turnkey plant manufacturer. This was actually part of a power struggle between Areva and EDF. You can see it did not turn out well.
Newer EPR plants (Flamanville, Taishan) reverted to a more traditional workshare.
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Ahh, but delays actually make a huge difference.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl... [pitt.edu]
It sounds like the European anti-nuke nutjobs have been paying attention to how the American crazies killed off the American nuclear industry.
87%, not 29% (Score:5, Informative)
"The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva"
Not according to Areva it hasn't.
http://www.areva.com/EN/financ... [areva.com]
"Today, public sector holdings (CEA, the French state and CDC) of group capital has risen close to 87%. 4% of AREVA’s share capital is float."
The French have a peculiar way of privatizing stuff. It sort of looks like the companies are private, but the state still ultimately owns them. And all these "private" companies are acting like global players. The problem is whose money are they playing with?
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As opposed to US companies, which are completely transparent?
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Re:87%, not 29% (Score:4, Interesting)
Allow me to translate from this french: "take its responsibility as a shareholder" = shoulder losses.
We here in France have what we call "état-stratège", where the taxpayer is turned into this wunderkind shareholder who holds lots of major stock forever and gets none of the dividends.
banks again ? (Score:3)
The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.
More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.
Westinghouse too (Score:3)
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Westinghouse's AP1000 is facing delays in China and the US causing huge cost overruns. http://chronicle.augusta.com/n... [augusta.com]
To be fair, I have worked with some of these Westinghouse guys and they are fairly universally not up to the task of playing in this industry. I'm not surprised they have tripped over their own dicks.
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Re:cutting corners (Score:5, Interesting)
The contract includes fines for delays, and the Finns (no pun intended) have now charged Billions worth of 'late fees' to Areva. Areva promised the moon and can't deliver. It would be great if public projects in the US would include the same sort of strong rules as what the Finns did here. No more overtime and over budget as the norm when building roads and bridges. A project being late would mean that tax payer money would increase instead of dwindling.
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I might forgive projects being over time - but being over time should never be rewarded with more money, thus making the project over budget as well.
Hey, I've worked construction for much of my life. If you normally have fifteen rain-days per year, and you budget twenty - that thirty fifth rain-out is REALLY fucking with your schedule!
Stuff happens, and I'll easily accept a highway opening a month late, or a high-rise opening three months late. Just don't PAY THE CONTRACTORS for being late!
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Also Finnish nuclear safety regulator has been careful. French kinda assumed that the regulations were basically just bunch of text on a page that could be ignored if they felt like it (and any regulatory hurdles could be cleared with backroom dealings and "trust us" hand waving).
Not so. In Finland nuclear plant safety is Serious Business (0 accidents and we'd like to keep it that way) and the people watching over the industry actually do their jobs. French were not pleased to find this out in practice - an
Re:cutting corners (Score:4, Funny)
They were caught red-handed cutting corners at the Olkiluoto site in Finland. Finns take security very seriously and hence the plant is already years late..
Yet another example of how interfering in the free market just ruins it for everyone.
If the communist Finns had just let the French build a quick and dirty version, they could have sorted out any resulting accidental deaths through the courts, thereby reducing the upfront costs and allowing the shareholders time to extract the profits before they could be wasted on compensation and paying government "safety" inspectors' exorbitant salaries.
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I've been hearing that since the '80s.
Re: The Left is in charge (Score:2)
Left and right are both useless but this is a private company.
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..And France is sinking like a rock. This is just one example.
Yes, the whole nuclear power industry started from scratch a couple of years ago when the Socialists got in.
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"he USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,"
Heh, funny. The USSR had been virtually bankrupt since the 70s and spent a huge amount of what GDP it had on defense ti try and keep up with the USA. It still failed plus it plunged a hundred million people into a miserable existence of food queues and no prospects.
But you keep on dreaming the communist dream if you like. Whatever makes you happy.
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it's actually more than that.
the company by all means should be already bankrupt. its just that french government ownership goes through couple of different ways to it, making it more than 70.
I mean, who the fuck would keep holdings in a company like this other than the french government? it should be bankrupt.
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The USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,
The USSR started sinking after it stopped raping it's Warsaw Pact allies for food, manpower and natural resources. It's easy to focus on industrialization and modernization when you can just steal food from eastern European countries you have control over. My Romanian and Ukrainian friends have stories about that...
I also notice your timeline of the great successes of the USSR seems to bounce over Stalin, under whom most of the modernization and industrialization took place (Lenin was only in charge for rou
Re:Bad design, poor execution (Score:5, Informative)
The reactor was bought with a fixed price contract by a private company called TVO. Areva has not been getting any extra money out of Finland. They are trying to sue the company that bought the reactor, TVO, but that is still ongoing and there is a countersuit too.
So I, as a finnish tax payer, have no direct stake in this. Of course, electricity prices might go down, if the reactor finally came online.