Get over Westinghouse being an “American” company. They were – back in the day – when they had blank checks from taxpayers stuffed into their wallets for overpriced nuclear power plants. When that went away, so did the interest from American investors.
So, in 2006, Toshiba bought control from the Brits. They recognized that alternatives to fossil fuel power are back on the agenda with real economic imperatives, this time. Here comes the broadening and deepening of political alliances.
Japan’s Toshiba sold 10 percent of its U.S.-based Westinghouse nuclear power unit to a Kazakh state uranium firm for $540 million in a deal that potentially unlocks vast fuel supplies for Toshiba.
Toshiba is betting on growing global demand for both nuclear and thermal power and hopes to win more nuclear plant orders by twinning them with promises to deliver uranium fuel.
Still, the deal — flagged by both firms last month — faces a challenge from Greenpeace and other environmental groups who have written to the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) asking them to reject it.
Kazatomprom President Mukhtar Dzhakhishev dismissed the challenge. “I can only advise these people to watch Disney cartoons instead of movies like Borat,” he told reporters.
Does the U.S. have an entrĂ© to Kazakhistan? You bet. The biggest single foreign investor in Kazakhstan – is Chevron – who owns a significant chunk of the Tengiz oilfield. Not exactly advocates for alternatives to fossil fuels.
Borat is going to be so happy!
I grow weary of saying this. Will the corporations and politicians who have the real power in this land ever learn to look more than 2 quarters down the road?
Presumably, by the time a broad range of alternatives are in place and experiencing logical economic growth – solar, wind power, nuclear power generation, biofuels, whatever – the majority of the firms will be owned and controlled elsewhere.
Germans have the lead in solar. Norwegians and Chinese have the lead in wind power. And the beat goes on.
Eet’s naaace!
Nukes are not the answer anyway. We need more wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power. There is no more expensive power in the world than nuclear power. The only reason nuclear power looks good to power companies is that they get the government to pay the costs of building the plant. Socialize the cost; privatize the profit. And, where will they put the waste? Yucca’s already 70% full, last I read, and it hasn’t even opened yet (and may never do so).
Nukes are not the answer anyway.
Not the ideal answer, perhaps. But an answer.
We need more wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power.
Yep. Something out of SF would be nice, too. A Shipstone, maybe.
Have you looked at the numbers for the eco-friendly alternatives, though? Not very promising, barring some incredible scientific breakthroughs. I mean, they’re great and all, they just don’t make enough power for our current demands, even if we went full tilt toward implementing them. There just ISN’T ENOUGH TIME.
There is no more expensive power in the world than nuclear power.
Most of those costs are from complying with regulations which were originally designed to increase costs enough to make them unprofitable, which they were obviously very effective at. Nuclear power, in and of itself, isn’t all that expensive per kilowatt.
And, where will they put the waste?
As Teddy Kennedy says, “We’ll drive off that bridge when we come to it.” I’m afraid at the moment, we really don’t have much choice. Time has pretty much run out on modern civilization for finding an alternative to fossil fuels. Nuclear waste, I admit, is a HUGE HUGE problem, but right now we are not unlike an animal caught in a trap that must chew its leg off to escape and survive. I think the WORST scenario for turning to nuclear power is postponing our destruction for a couple of hundred years. The most hopeful scenario is to use nukes as a crutch until science catches up with demand. (And economies of scale, lowering demand, etc etc and so on and so on.)
You and I will be dead before the shit really hits the fan, but it’s coming, boy-o.
Overpriced nukes? Try overpriced AND the lousiest, most-trouble-prone to boot. Those fuckers are notorious for their corner-cutting. Them and Kazakhstan – a match made in Hell…
#5, good morning, Scott. I’ve been an environmental activist for decades. One of the reasons I worked on nuclear power, back then.
I fear that – like many of my enviro peers – your analysis of what nuclear power generation requires is decades out of date. It’s like deciding what car you should buy on the basis of an advert for a 1962 Dodge. You’re skipping what’s been done since. And maybe you didn’t consider the alternatives utilized by other countries even in the 60’s.
Breeder reactors have always produced minimal radioactive waste – and with much shorter half-lives. I won’t wander off into the economics of the original crappy American systems – you know what was at play, certainly.
But, even thermal reactors offer a tenth of the problems they used to. And breeder reactors less than a tenth of that! Get up to date a bit:
http://tinyurl.com/2p9wms as a suggested start.
And, of course, as I said above, it is only a part of what’s possible. 10 minutes ago [on German TV news] I was watching engineers from Siemens analyzing their proposed investment in wave-generated electricity on the coast of Scotland.
Gee, I wonder if we have any coastline that isn’t under condos?
I hate the idea of nuclear power. It would eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, and take away the incentive for people to change their consumption lifestyles.
Then again I’ve seen too many environmental mandates to solve one problem causing a real environmental disaster as a result. CAFE, MBTE, soon mandatory change of light bulbs will cause mercury disposal problems, etc. So I guess using nuclear power to solve our global warming problem will end up causing other disasters. I’ll stick with the routine power plant deaths. Besides, global warming has been overblown, as Stephen Schwartz has a new study with an estimate of warming about a third what the IPCC came up with.
Besides, global warming has been overblown, as Stephen Schwartz has a new study with an estimate of warming about a third what the IPCC came up with.
STEVEN SCHWARTZ???? Wow!!! That settles it.
Who is Steven Schwartz?
Stephen Schwartz? You mean the ex-Trotskyite who’s a neo-con journalist, this week?
#6 – I like your analogy. It also applies to this country. We’re caught in a trap and the only way out is to chew our leg off. Leg= GW Bush.
#8 – god,
I strongly suspect that the numbers in your article include neither the building of the plant nor the decommissioning of the plant. Both of these costs are typically not borne by the power company, but instead are externalized to the taxpayer.
Further, a nuclear plant takes a long time to build. So, if anything, nuclear power is the source that will be too slow to solve our climate change crisis.
Here is what I have heard the costs per kilowatt hour are for various power sources and an analysis of why nuclear is too expensive to solve global warming can be found here.
http://www.net.org/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=18534
#8 – god,
Also, please remember the cost of Yucca, which is probably not included on the balance sheet of any nuclear power facility.
#10 – MikeN,
What problems have you seen from CAFE? (Other than the problem of not increasing the damn standard and including light trucks in it.)
As for mercury in our light bulbs, there are some things to remember:
1) The amount of mercury in the bulb is less than the amount of mercury released by a coal power plant to produce the additional electricity that would have been used by a conventional bulb.
2) Proper bulb disposal must be required.
3) Public awareness campaigns must be launched.
4) The amount of mercury in your thermometers is dramatically higher than in a CFL.
#15, Scott – the essential point I make about breeder reactors is that the requirements for a facility like Yucca diminish to 1/100th of the sort of reactors American tend to base their analyses on. As you just have done.
Even the 2&1/2G stuff that Toshiba is building reduces waste requiring storage by about 90%. Still not my preference.
My original criticism applies also to common (outdated) perception of time to onstream and decommissioning (also much less of a factor for the past couple of decades). Go back and look at Eid’s Post on the Toshiba-Westinghouse plants to be built in China (cripes! he even used the same photo).
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=12787
Construction starts in 2009 – first plant online in four years – numbers 2 through 4 in the following two years. That’s comparable to a conventional power plant, nowadays.
Stop trying to buy that ’62 Dodge. 🙂
#17 – god,
That ’62 dodge is still the only car available in the U.S. I’ll take a look. But, the cost factors of building the plant and later decommissioning it still apply.
There are also safety issues, not just internally, but as a target of terrorism.
There are also issues with the fact that money spent on these plants is not spent on renewable energy projects that could come on line much more quickly than nuclear power plants possibly can. And, we may be at or very near the tipping point right now. We can’t possibly be sure whether we have enough time for nukes.
Then there’s the issue that for nukes to help us, we’ll need 25 times the number of nuclear plants in the world today. Many of these will be in developing nations with far lower safety standards than first world nations. Some of these nations do not yet have nuclear weapons, but might when these projects are complete.
The wolves move in, and begin to slice up the dying cow.
Duzzat makes sense?
>nuclear power is the source that will be too slow to solve our climate change crisis.
That makes no sense. How long does it take to build a nuclear power plant versus the other technologies that haven’t even been developed yet? Why nuclear power managed to win a war against the Japanese 50 60 years ago. I think plants can be built fast enough if there is public support.
CAFE probably doesn’t belong on the same list as an environmental problem, as the damage was tens of thousands more people dead in car accidents.
As for CFL light bulbs, you say a certain bulb disposal should be required, but that will not be the reality. I think we may have a problem here. For any individual home, the chance of a bulb going bad is miniscule, so the payoff in energy savings is worthwhile. Over millions of homes, and 100 million bulbs, you can expect maybe 5 million to go bad per year. Even with a 90% compliance rate, you still have 500 thousand bulbs going into ordinary trash and then it’s a matter of how good are the landfills at keeping mercury in.
http://tinyurl.com/27eukd
Here’s the link to the Schwartz paper I mentioned earlier. I wonder what the IPCC 2012 report will look like.
#21 – MikeN,
The thing is that over the average life of each bulb, it will save enough coal fired power to avoid putting more mercury into the environment. If we get rid of coal, you may have a point. However, with all of the mercury being poured into the environment by the coal plants, even if all of the bulbs are thrown out at the end of their lives, there is still a reduction in mercury from the reduced coal use.
As for wind, solar, and tidal, all are already in use and cheap. When compared with nuclear, they’re much cheaper. When compared with fossil fuels, on the surface they appear slightly more expensive, but only because of our faulty accounting. We don’t count things like the Iraq war as a cost of oil. We also don’t count all of the subsidies to the fossil fuel industries, all of which go into the total cost of the power.
Anyway, I’m not sure what gives you the idea that there are not huge solar arrays, huge wind farms, and probably not huge yet on tidal power, but it’s in use in the East River, with a huge array of turbines being installed.
Also, please remember the cost of Yucca, which is probably not included on the balance sheet of any nuclear power facility.
Comment by Misanthropic Scott
Okay, how about killing the proverbial two birds with one stone(r)?
We bury the wastes at Yucca, and also toss in the Chinese Toys. The lead in the toys should protect us if there’s any leakage.
J/P=?
Well, I was referring to your claim that nuclear power wouldn’t work in time to stop global warming. Given that nuclear power was harnessed within 4 years to stop Japan, I think plants could come on line easily. If all of these other clean technologies are available now, then why are people always proposing billions for investing in new technology? I assume that the goal is some better technology plants. As for the coal fired plants vs CFLs, I assume that means you oppose electric cars on the same calculation, and perhaps plugin hybrids as well?
#24 – MikeN,
I still don’t see that happening. Don’t look at the Manhattan project. That’s what happens when the U.S. gets pissed, not when the U.S. is in denial.