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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: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 31 2017, @05:08PM (1 child)
We are perfectly capable of building reactors that have safe void coefficients and passive safety, and they don't even necessarily need to be thorium-cycle, though I'd prefer that. But we don't. Why?
Like every other case where we have the technology but don't do it, the answer is political and/or economic, specifically rent-seeking. The thought of "electricity too cheap to meter" scares the ever-loving actinide slag out of the greedheads.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday April 01 2017, @05:51AM
Electricity "too cheap to meter" still costs money to send across the power grid.
I only realized significance of this recently upon learning that solar power is approaching "grid parity". That is to say, the amortised cost of solar panels will be cheaper than drawing power from the grid. Of course, solar is intermittent, so either (battery) storage or grid hook-up is still needed.