Westinghouse Files for Bankruptcy, in Blow to Nuclear Power (opens in new tab)

Seeing technology become outdated after 3-4 years is kind of amazing in all the wrong ways.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that what we're really seeing is explosive advances, and to think about being stuck where we were 3-4 years ago, frozen in time, without permission to advance is a horrible thought.

But at the same time, I hate not being about to used something I paid thousands of dollars for, less than five years later, because I scratched a CD-ROM, and downloads for compatible upgraded drivers are not supported.

Your water boiler hasn't changed in the past 70 years.

Sending an expert to a remote site or a ship to fix a problem is a last resort.

My group used to have a list to sign up for going out on sea trials. I never got high enough on it to go. If you don't want to go, I doubt you would have to.

Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.

On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.

It's only recently that renewables have become a realistic alternative in some (but not all) cases, but for decades we've had people dropping like flies due to coal, entirely because the public is too science illiterate to understand that nuclear isn't anywhere as big of a deal by comparison.

1. https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/...

Also they had a fin on one of the turbines of another reactor break off and it the reactor wall in the mid-2000s.

In a situation where something that severe (and malicious) is found, what would even be the short-term response? Are the management of the plant completely replaced?

The DoE does lots of work in Texas, and as former governor Perry had experience in working with them on managing the US's nuclear weapons stockpile. Part of his campaign platform in 2011 was to split the National Nuclear Security Administration out of the DoE and give it to the DoD.

In his statement accepting the nomination, he specifically called out the role of the DoE in safeguarding the US nuclear arsenal.

Otherwise don't let me stop the "hurr Durr stupid Republicans" circle jerk.

Couldn't remember the name of it either, but was going to get rid of it regardless!

That's putting it a bit strong, after all Marie Curie died of "aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation" in 1934. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

And "actress Midori Naka, present during the bombing, was studied extensively for radiation poisoning. Her death in 1945 was the first to be officially documented as having been caused by radiation poisoning" http://www.news-medical.net/health/Radiation-Poisoning-Histo...

So they might not have had good statistics but they certainly had reason to be cautious.

Of course radiation is also used to treat cancer, there is a good side to many things.

Knowledge is a crucial part of that, too. The Saturn rocket program is a great example - if we decided to go back to the moon tomorrow, we'd be a decade or more in the doing of it, because all the people who knew how to build those rockets, and the tools to build those rockets, and the tools to build those tools, and so on - are by now retired or deceased. We'd have to figure all that stuff out all over again, as nearly from scratch as makes no odds. There's no reason to imagine any other similarly complex technology would be different.

Thus your argument does not support your conclusion, since regulations come from outside the industry.

The economics might be different if we paid for the real cost of carbon-based energy, instead of imposing that cost on the world as an externality.

Who's going to invest a billion dollars to build a new facility when they know that at any step along the way, some half-wit celebrity can decide that they want to buy property in the area and they don't want to live near a nuclear power plant, start protests and cause the project to be delayed or scrapped.

Continuing to run an old design is a very big part of how we ended up with the current situation with Fukushima.

[0] http://www.naic.org/cipr_topics/topic_nuclear_liability_insu...

In many ways this wound on Westinghouse (and nuclear power) is self inflicted. As engineers moved out of senior management and politicians moved in in the late 70's, the company became less about moving technology forward and more about 'getting money for management'. It really lost its way.

I expect that the Chinese nuclear power industry will become nearly all of the civilian reactors by the end of this century.

All of this is just armchair reasoning though. I have not the faintest idea what the most expensive parts of building a reactor are.

There is also no accountability on the part of the customer companies either.

The public service commission pretty much votes to allow ga power to pass the costs to the rate payer.

Georgia Rate payers are already paying for the cost of votgle 3&4 in the form of rate increases when their completion is no where in sight.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Air pollution deaths are "normal operation" not catastrophic event. Whereas normal operation deaths for nuclear is essentially 0, where deaths happen as a result of catastrophe. So there is something of a lizard brain mentality going on when it comes to near term risk assessment. I think the rational arguments pretty much are all economic: they're expensive and basically even a highly regulated and subsidized "free market" has said this isn't worth it and we can't make it work.

Other political factors such as the inherit stigma around nuclear and the upheaval of the defense-sector supply chain make them a harder sell.

It's fraud - people refusing to tell or put things down on official financial reports, writing false statements, signing false financial reports, using non GAAP, unusual accounting methods, etc. Also, audits and due diligence didn't uncover the magnitude of the problem. It took a whistleblower to get the story out to upper management.

https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/02/14/toshiba-chairman...

this article outlines the contract issues, but there were other issues at play at the same time

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-working...

I think only having power sources cheaper than carbon will fix it. Which could potentially include sources cheaper because a carbon tax forces carbon prices to include their externalities.

Perhaps renewables can scale up, but last I heard that wasn't realistic on the time scale humanity needs. Does anyone have good information on that question?

http://www.reuters.com/article/france-power-winteroutlook-id...

(Reuters claims that there wasn't enough spare capacity in Germany; in fact the transfer capacity of ~2 GW was the limiting factor; http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=32860)

For what it's worth, I think the temperatures improved before the more drastic measures had to be implemented. And of course people are free to argue that taking those French plants down for review was an overreaction by an overly critical nuclear regulation regime.

Already do. 55% of my state's power comes from Nuclear.

Coal releases 100x more radiation and 68x more CO2 than nuclear for equal energy production. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045

And it isn't like coal is immune from having zero-notice forced evacuation, and making land uninhabitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

That's an exaggeration. Even if containment were to fail completely on all reactors at Fukushima, the release of radioactive products would make some area uninhabitable and cost a lot of money, but won't lead to even a large loss of life, let alone extinction.

I agree that Fukushima could get hella messy if not dealt with right over the next decades.. but 'extinction level' seems a tad dramatic?

The salt mine Assen that they put some nuclear waste in is now flooded. Getting the nuclear waste back out will cost several billions. I don't think they will even do it. So they risk contaminating ground water. That alone can be a cost of several billion.

And even if they do clean it up they are back to square zero in their quest for long term storage.

Not concerned about the votes, just curious if the topic of canonical URLs, clusters, etc. had come up.

> Westinghouse purchased CBS in 1995 and became CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998, CBS established a brand licensing subsidiary Westinghouse Licensing Corporation (Westinghouse Electric Corporation). In 1997/1998 the Power Generation Business Unit, headquartered in Orlando, FL, was sold to Siemens AG, of Germany. A year later, CBS sold all of its nuclear power businesses to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). Soon after, BNFL gained license rights on the Westinghouse trademarks and they used those to reorganize their acquired assets as Westinghouse Electric Company. That company was sold to Toshiba in 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporat...

My dad was always in nuclear though (well, after a brief stint at Tektronix).

Some bombs use essentially tiny wind turbines to measure fall, and ready the fuse when far enough from the releasing plane...

Now who's the militarist? :)