Delays, Confusion as Toshiba Reports $6 Billion Nuclear Hit and Slides To Loss (reuters.com) 88
Makiko Yamazaki, reporting for Reuters: After a day of delays and confusion, Japan's Toshiba said on Tuesday it expected to book a $6.3 billion hit to its U.S. nuclear unit, a writedown that wipes out its shareholder equity and will drag the group to a full-year loss. Hours earlier on Tuesday, the battered conglomerate rattled investors by failing to release its earnings on schedule, saying initially it was 'not ready' and then announcing later it needed more time to probe its Westinghouse nuclear business after internal reports uncovered potential problems. The figures eventually released were numbers that have yet to be approved by its auditor and Toshiba cautioned investors that a major revision was possible. Fully audited numbers are now not due till March 14 after the firm was granted a reprieve for its formal filing by Japanese regulators. "Finally now people are starting to recognize that internal control problems, the accounting issues and governance issues are very real and no longer abstract," said Zuhair Khan, an analyst at Jefferies in Tokyo. "They impact the viability of the company."
China and South Korea and Russia can do it (Score:2, Insightful)
Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget. A half ass commitment will fail for any large project, be it nuclear or other.
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Except the nuclear reactors that Toshiba is building in China... the usual story... delays, cost overruns.
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The delays in China were basically one-two year delays while all the new reactors being built were reviewed post-Fukushima. It had little to do with construction problems. There is only one reactor family with major construction delays which can be imputable to the design and construction right now and that is EPR.
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Part of Toshiba's problem is the reactors they are building in China.
Nuclear has gone from "too cheap to meter" to "too expensive to matter".
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Yet nuclear is still subsidizing the renewables in Germany and elsewhere last time I looked at it. Funny uh?
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Your comment doesn't make any sense...
Here's Wikipedia's entry for Germany:
Germany[edit]
"Comparison of the levelized cost of electricity for some newly built renewable and fossil-fuel based power stations in euro per kWh (Germany, 2013)
In November 2013, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE assessed the levelised generation costs for newly built power plants in the German electricity sector.[39] PV systems reached LCOE between 0.078 and 0.142 Euro/kWh in the third quarter of 2013, depending
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https://www.dissentmagazine.or... [dissentmagazine.org]
To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that c
Re: China and South Korea and Russia can do it (Score:2)
This article is bullshit.
There is no such thing as dispatchable nuclear or coal. These plants are 100% on or off and it takes days or weeks to turn them on.
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Nuclear can be ramped up and down. It's not as fast as a natural gas plant but it can do fast load-follow especially if the load is highly predictable. Even modern coal power plants can do it to a degree and theoretically a coal gasification plant could ramp up and down as quickly as a natural gas power plant.
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Nuclear output can only be reduced by a small amount and only slowly. It can't be increased again due to poisoning of the core.
Coal gasification could be dispatchable but the plants, for the most part, don't exist (only 272 worldwide). They also produce a lot of toxic compounds.
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No, that's not it. Running overbudget is more of a customer problem and is usually caused by customer changes in the middle of construction.
Exactly. It's a customer problem. You originally wanted the walls of the control room painted white. We haven't even started building the control room yet, let alone purchased the paint and you are changing the requirement to 'grey'? That'll obviously cost you 1.6 million in additional fees.
Have you never worked in contracting before?
Roofers quoted me $2,500 to re-shingle my house two years ago. They started the process, then found 4 sheets of OSB that were slightly water damaged and needed to be
Re:China and South Korea and Russia can do it (Score:5, Informative)
> Countries that want to and commit to building nuclear can do it well, on decent schedule and budget
Uhh, yeah.
Over the years, Russia has committed to building something like 50 reactors. After Chernobyl, that was reduced to something like 25. They have grand plans for a closed fuel cycle using breeder/burners and reprocessing, and lots of other ideas. So far they've successfully built three. The rest remain hopelessly overdue or completely unfunded. They have decommed as many as they've built since 2000.
China had big plans too, something between 50 and 100 reactors over a 25 to 45 year period. Then the 2008 Sichuan earthquake happened, and they learned that all the construction companies lied and cut corners practically everywhere. The famous school that collapsed only did so because the construction team couldn't be bothered to bend the end of the rebars in the vertical supports, which would have otherwise easily survived. This, needless to say, opened many people's eyes, and the plans have been scaled back to about 25 reactors.
However, these plans are very much in doubt. CNNC based much of its economic arguments on buying up old western designs and then selling them, with Chinese financing, around the world. This did not happen, no one is interested in building nuclear and sales have been rather limited. As a result, the government has been somewhat more interested in renewables, which everyone is buying, and the country has since become the largest installer of wind and solar on the planet. They install more PV in the last five years than the entire planned nuclear buildout.
Nuclear is dead. Siemens, Framitome, AECL, Westinghouse, Toshiba, B&W, BNFL, and on and on and on. The few remaining players are all on life support - GE looks very much like they'll end development with their current generation, Areva only remains alive due to repeated massive French taxpayer infusions, and CNNC's only prospects are local.
You can pretend this isn't true, and many people reply to my messages talking about all these paper plans, but to anyone that's actually worked in the energy industry, the CAPEX > $7.50 is a death knell and everyone knows it.
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don't know a business? don't buy it. (Score:3)
appears there was horrid due diligence all the way down the line when Toshiba decided to go for the Westinghouse nuke business as Westinghouse shed its skin to become CBS. and then one bad addition after another. shame.
Other problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Shares in the group slid 8 percent, putting the company's market value at 973 billion yen ($8.6 billion), less than half its value in mid-December. Just under a decade ago, the firm was worth almost 5 trillion yen.
Lost over 80% of it's market value in ten years. Sounds like Toshiba has other problems besides this.
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I see value, buy!
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Toshiba has certainly had it's fair share of problems lately, but in this instance it's the nuclear division that is specifically underperforming.
Basically low demand, low profitability, and poor management are to blame.
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Encase in ceramic, drop into a deep subduction zone. Earth will recycle them over the next million years.
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So, responsible governments allow reprocessing, and consequently have this problem figured out. Yucca mountain is a problem caused by Jimmy Carter's ignorant, foolish decision to prohibit reprocessing fuel rods. Almost all of the scary radioactive elements in a first run fuel rod are sources of energy that we're throwing away right now, and plan to bury, instead of doing the environmentally and fiscally responsible thing and reprocessing them.
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WTF!
buidling a nuclear plant is a HUGE investment... true that it have a long life...but you are just another one that thinks that nuclear waste do not cost any money and somebody else problem. For you and anybody that think like this, you and your family (and all future childrends) should move next to a nuclear waste storage and not leave for thousand of years
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jokes on your great great great grandchildren then as my great great great grandchildren will be atomic supermen by then!
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it's the only power generation, at all, that's pre-funding cleanup..
LOL!
if you don't even know how much that cleanup will cost, how it is funding it!
they must put some cleanup money now, because later may not be any money for that (company went bust) and the cleanup is REQUIRED due the time scale of the dangers, but you are crazy to think that money will be enough.
Petrol, coal, gas, solar, water, etc may have a "half live" contamination of some years and about 100 years for the structures (maybe a little mo
Re:Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Wind and solar are getting to the point where they'll be cheaper than coal (without subsidies). Nuclear is the most expensive.
Re: Nuclear: too dangerous, too expensive (Score:1)
Point to a single credible levelized cost per MWh analysis that shows this. Solar and wind are still quite expensive on average, even when you don't factor in the cost if intermittency management.
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This was posted below:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016... [cleantechnica.com]
The data is from Lazard Asset Management... a reputable source.
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Wind and solar are getting to the point where they'll be cheaper than coal (without subsidies). Nuclear is the most expensive.
That's not correct. Not with gas so cheap due to fracking.
Solar has higher maintenance costs than the solar guys want to admit. Wind has issues with capacity, NIMBY issues, and environmental concerns with bird migrations. Because no utility scale power storage works anywhere (Powerwalls won't cut it), both have problems with generating electricity to meet demand, which power generation must meet on a minute by minute basis. And no, the fully capitalized cost of wind and solar are still way above the ful
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Your image showed the most expensive nuclear as cheaper than the cheapest residential solar. Utility-scale solar was comparable to, or cheaper than, nuclear, but that didn't include the required back-up power (your utility-scale unit is just as susceptible to clouds as your home system, which requires a backup)....
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Here is some real data from a financial firm showing wind and solar to be cheaper:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016... [cleantechnica.com]
Do you have any references for your WAG assertions?
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Which would mean we have a choice between "renewables" combined with very dirty coal or somewhat-cleaner-but-still-dirty methane; or going with an all nuclear strategy which would give us large quantities of zero-emissions energy.
But that must, of course, be wrong. It violates the
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I've been hearing that for two decades now. It still isn't true.
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True, but only because wind and solar now ARE cheaper than coal (*), if you compare new generation, i.e. building a new plant.
* Of course, this depends on your location.
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If you don't count the cost of building the plant, solar and wind beat everything hands down since they don't have any ongoing fuel cost and only minimal maintenance cost.
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Believe it or not, a lot has changed in 20 years.
To get you up to date, here's a good article (with real data) showing solar and wind are cheaper than coal and nuclear:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016... [cleantechnica.com]
Short version for the click impaired: $Cost per MWh: Wind $32, Solar $39, Coal $60, Nuclear $97
These are unsubsidized prices for wind and solar... coal and nuclear are the subsidized prices and do not include the cost of external damage.
"A study led by the former head of the Harvard Medical School found that c
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Here's another data point.
The West's largest coal power plant will be shut down decades before the end of it's useful life because it's "too expensive" to operate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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In reality they have just crossed another milestone: they are cheaper when they are generating. That will do for now while there is substantial fossil capacity to back them up, but if we are to phase out fossil fuels entirely the figure you have to compare nuclear to is generation plus storage.
The cheapest by far is pumped storage. In countries with plenty of hydro it's effectively free. For the rest of us it's about $1/watt generation capacity. Nuclear comes in at $8/watt or so. Wind comes in at $4/wa
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People often complain that wind and solar are intermittent whereas nuclear is 100% all the time (as is most coal electricity production).
In use, power plants which can't be throttled back for times of low demand are as much a problem as power plants which vary their output during the day.
You are right that the grid needs storage. It's crazy hard to match supply to demand when your demand changes all the time and your supply doesn't magically follow the demand.
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Yeah, but they handle that by varying demand. To wit: most of coal here have an aluminium plant pair with them, who get their power for near free. They take the excess supply. It's not a total solution because the price of power here goes negative most nights (ie, the coal power generators PAY others to take their power) - so they are offloading some of i
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Don't let the door hit... (Score:2)
As I've posted before, Fuck Toshiba and the [generic beast of burden] they rode in on. They have by far the worst consumer customer service I've ever run across.
Re:Don't let the door hit... (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks, I'll make sure to get my next nuclear power plant from someone else!
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Toshiba Customer Support: Hello, and thank you for calling Toshiba Customer Support. How can I help you today?
cellocgw: There's hole burning through the bottom of my Toshiba Nuclear Power Plant and it's really, really hot in here. What should I do?
TCS: Have you tried rebooting?
c: Yes, I've tried rebooting. I've also pulled the core out while the reactor was on and then re-inserted to core and turned it back on. That's how I fix my Blackberry.
TCS: Great. What happened when you did that?
c: I got even hot
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Never dealt with Asus, I suspect.
I'm rather displeased with Toshiba, too, but not for that reason. They've pulled out of the low-end and consumer laptop business, which is a shame, because in 10 years I've only had one customer with a fault that required talking to Toshiba customer support.
Now I've got to find a new brand that has similar reliability. Perhaps I'll give Lenovo a try - wouldn't touch HP with a ten-foot pole.
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True, both ways generate huge profits for the stock owners and CEO at the cost of the common people.
But all new techs have bubbles and from the thousand of companies that show up, only a few will survive and grow, all others will go bust. Those that invest need to know how to choose and what to choose. Nuclear included
My HDs and Toshiba's Profits (Score:2)
Hope they all burn, now give me my damn RMA
Do we still need nuclear? (Score:2)
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In essence, th
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If you were to replace electric heating with gas/wood, and electric cooking with gas (or wood), your daily kWh (of electrical demand) would plummet. Any electrical heating element is a killer for off-grid use.
Is air-conditioning part of the consideration? Are you planning to live somewhere that you might do without it? Is your off-grid house going to have some passive cooling designs?
If you want to go off-grid, you've *got* to change your outlook. In order to avoid spending more money on PV, batteries, and
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Burning wood may be fine for individuals or families, but as you scale up into the hundreds of thousands or millions of households, you get a lot of smog/smoke, and then you run out of trees.
AP1000 (Score:2)
It's not a very good product. That's why Toshiba is loosing money on this business.
The suspended emergency cooling system makes the containment building a heat exchanger and a pressure vessel in case of an emergency. Not that that's a bad idea, however it's an untested design improvement. It's little wonder clients would be wary, with all the terrorism now a days.
Its primary competitor is the EPR reactor whose containment building is double walled and resistant to military attacks, so it's a much toughe
Nuclear Power is a Loser (Score:2)
The only nuclear business that might make sense is recycling nuclear waste. Eventually, there will be desperate customers. The catch is that it may take a long time for the politicians to figure out there is no other way to get rid of nuclear waste.