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Westinghouse Electric Company has filed for bankruptcy:
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.
Also at Ars Technica and Business Insider.
Toshiba's Westinghouse problems have caused the company to sell off other assets:
Toshiba in Trouble
Toshiba Shares Plunge Ahead of Nuclear Investment Writedown
Toshiba Considers NAND Business Split; Samsung Delays Release of 4 TB SSDs
Toshiba Nuked Half its Assets
(Score: 5, Informative) by Aiwendil on Friday March 31 2017, @08:47AM (3 children)
A few things.
1) Yeah, the AP1000 is a smaller large/upper midsize reactor
1b) It's main features are enhanced modularity and ability to be built progressivly cheaper (with high cost for start of the series)
1bb) also enhanced safety
1c) Keep an eye on the upcomming CPR1400 for future info about how it will pan out when properly managed.
2) China started up 5GWe worth of nuclear in 2016 iirc (and has about 20GWe under active construction)
3) USA's nuclear generation is about 19% of it's total, that from only about 100GWe nuclear installed
3b) Capacity factor matters
3c) The US grid actually can be supplied with less than 600GWe, it has a scary high degree of mismatch and ineffeciency in it.
4) If you want to see nuclear built properly take a look at VVER-1000, APR1400, Hitachi-ABWR, Candu 6e (latest finished ahead of time and under budget), or historically the french N2, and the swedish ABB BWR-69 and -75 or Westinghouse late-70s/early-80s models.
4b) USA (and sweden, and france, and germany) lost its game in the mid-80s, sad since they made lots of good stuff.
5) Why do people only point out the failures and never the sucesses? A few reactors (including a GenIII+) has come online (or entered commercial operation) this year already
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday March 31 2017, @09:37AM
Nope, remembered wrong - they started up 7.5GWe in 2016
(Score: 3, Informative) by subs on Friday March 31 2017, @10:33AM (1 child)
China started up [7.5]GWe worth of nuclear in 2016
Comparing that to poster's 34GW for solar would seem to be leaving nuclear in the dust. Until you compare capacity factors and find out that solar is about 0.1 while nuclear is 0.9 - 0.95. So in net terms, they've brought 2x the amount of nuclear capacity online.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @07:12AM
yeah, and there's ONE hospital for the whole country and it belongs to people who for soem reason don't like you (but also service the countries presidents health).
if the top-left area of the country crashes the grid and the single nuke .. err.. hospital happens to be in that area the whole country craps out.
we don't need more centralizrd nuclear waste generation to power your shitty iPad and xploding samsung mobile phones.
power to the people and give everybody a chance to participate in generating a stable grid ... with lots of little hospitals (with some that like you).