Westinghouse Files For Bankruptcy, In Blow To Nuclear Power (reuters.com) 251
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.
It's just too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter"
Everything (coal, gas, wind, solar) is cheaper than nuclear.
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
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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 th
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
>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".
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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 tra
Re:It's just too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
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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.
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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-
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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 t
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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 reade
Nuclear costs more to make safe (Score:2)
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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 dis
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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
Re:It's just too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I work at a lab that analyzes nuclear plant effluent samples
This is why I love Slashdot. Great, informative post. Thank you!
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
It was bound to happen (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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 ar
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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.
On track long before then (Score:2)
Re:It was bound to happen (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Shoudl be a warning to people working on fusion (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Self inflicted (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
The market for nuclear in China dried up years ago with Fukushima. It's not the tech, it's the cost and risk.
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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... [world-nuclear.org]
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.
Cheap energy (Score:2)
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 n
Trump And Polution (Score:3)
That's OK you can build coal stations (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Power lines have more transmission losses and worse energy density than a natural gas pipeline.
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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.
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Re: Economics wins again (Score:2)
You do realise that natural gas pipelines basically use jet engines to pump that gas?
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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.
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Gas pipelines don't suffer transmission losses.
Transmission losses (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Isn't it lucky that we already have a lot of them and that more are being built all of the time.
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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/... [npr.org]
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 [npr.org]
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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.
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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 H
Perfect is the enemy of the good (Score:2)
Yes. Perhaps you should find out more a
Re: Perfect is the enemy of the good (Score:2)
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 an
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I did not do that. I suggested you consider what the losse
Re: (Score:2)
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
2,385km is not long? (Score:2)
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.
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: (Score:2)
I think he may have been using voice-to-text.
Re:Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Sorry for the stupid joke... (Score:2)
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 ?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: Westinghouse a unit of Toshiba Bankru (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
Coal is dying, it's was more a matter of Trump allowing a graceful natural death or Obama's accelerated forced death.
Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Informative)
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 (thor
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:3)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Westinghous
Re: (Score:2)
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... [google.com]
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
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 c
Re:"Green" technologies aren't sufficient. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know if you know this, but coal is buried carbon deposits from millions of years ago.
In other words, natural trash.
Re:Systemic management failure (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~bl... [pitt.edu]
They didn't manage to get it wrong, the wrong was done to them intentionally.
Re:Solar is much more profitable (Score:5, Interesting)
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).