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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01 2017, @08:21AM (2 children)
So, if I am correctly following your train of thought: "we shouldn't pursue the fantastically safer thorium/MSR power production tech versus the existing solid uranium fuel/PWR designs because the former may possibly be used for proliferation of nuclear weapons while the latter was developed explicitly for production of those very same weapons."
Eloquently stated, sir.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday April 02 2017, @10:58AM
Personally, I think the potential benefits are worth the risk.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday April 02 2017, @11:44PM
> fantastically safer
I wonder why you say that in response to the quote, which I interpret saying it isn't markedly safer. The procedure they're describing is explained more clearly by Popular Mechanics:
If an element known as protactinium-233 is extracted from thorium early in the irradiation process, no uranium-232 will form. Instead, the separated protactinium-233 will decay into high purity uranium-233, which can be used in nuclear weapons.
-- http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a11907/is-the-superfuel-thorium-riskier-than-we-thought-14821644/ [popularmechanics.com]
With the type of molten salt reactor that is usually touted, you'll have on-site reprocessing facilities. The removal of protactinium could be done there; in fact, separation of protactinium was a feature of some older designs for thorium-fuelled molten salt reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Removal_of_fission_products [wikipedia.org]
> versus the existing solid uranium fuel/PWR designs
In a reactor designed to transmute 232Th into 233U, what stops the operator from dropping in 238U, transmuting it into 239Pu, and removing the 239Pu before it becomes 240Pu, just as one can do with a reactor designed to run on uranium? 238U appears to be easy to acquire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium [wikipedia.org]