AMEN brother!
Hi Rod, wish you all the best to get the little gadgets up, running and rolling out of production lines!
cheers, Ondrej
With all the talk of shortages in concrete, steel and capacity to forge big pressure vessels, it's about time to look to designs that avoid using much of these commodities.
What I see however is a very conservative industry that is unwilling to move away from tried-and-true designs. Hopefully these limitations in material will serve to push next generation reactors to the forefront, and encourage some standardization.
For a more detailed discussion of this theme, see:
http://www.endofglobalwarming.co...com/
#Lite_Nuke_
The basic problem with the razor and blades analogy is that it misses all the complicating social factors. If beards become fashionable the shaving industry collapses. This is a key concept for the energy industry - air pollution has not been a cost factor so far, and that is changing. Industrial scale combustion has to end. Cost is not a consideration because dead people dont buy energy. IMHO, no one, and I mean everyone, is willing to look at this issue head on and acknowledge its full impact.
Unfortunately Randal an attitude adjustment will not clear production bottlenecks, and that's more of a worry than cost or public opinion. The only thing we can do at this point is design ourselves out of this corner. We have done this in the past and wound up the better for it in the long run.
DV82XL
The generic commodity costs are a fairly minor factor in the overall cost of a nuclear power plant. Anyone who points to commodity costs to justify high costs in the nuclear industry is IMHO pulling a fast one.
Nuclear power plants don't use that much concrete and mild steel compared to their output. A conservative estimate is around 40 metric tonnes of mild steel and 200 m3 of concrete (~110 metric tonnes of cement) per MW. Or, if you prefer, 0.040 mt of mild steel and 0.110 mt of cement per kW. So let's assume very high prices for good quality, well controlled products. $1,500/mt for steel rebars, plates and fibers. $600/mt for the kind of very high quality portland/silica fume mix used in high strength concrete. It all adds up to a grand total of $126/kW. The rest is literally crushed rocks and water and we're not running out of that by any measure.
That's 5% of the overnight cost of a plant. So, even if general commodity prices double or triple, it's not a big difference in a $2,500/kW budget.
The real cost of a nuclear power plant is in the engineering and manufacturing. The nuclear and power generation equipments account for more than 80% of the total cost and there the prices are not driven by commodities but by the supply chain, the availability of the factories, the cost of qualified workers, etc.
All of that is under control of the suppliers and a factor of their willingness to invest. There is no market to speak of. Utilities are not out there outbidding each other for a spot in line at Japan Steel. You have orders, you build the factory. You don't have orders, you graze cows. And given the time-line of building a nuclear power plant, it's very easy to plan ahead and be ready. But it requires that the suppliers believe in their own business to start with. It's not a given with companies like GE. Now, that is a real problem.
The rest is general contracting and with the sinking economy esp. in the real estate and public work sector, labor costs and availability are not going to be an issue for many years to come.
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IMHO, the FPL joke is coming from the financing structures. Many "regulated" utilities in the US essentially operate on a cost-plus model, a slightly more civilized version of KBR in Iraq and the $45 six-packs of Coke. They have no incentive to control their costs as long they can get them past the public utility commission.
I also suspect that they are not doing much effort on the financing front. When the costs can be fully passed to the rate-payers and when the plant has, for all purposes, a guaranteed market for its output, you have a cash cow in your hands.
It really takes a very special kind of talent to pay anything more than a few percents above the 10-years Treasury bond. After the subprime and Alt-A debacle, I suspect that there are a lot of investors looking for real returns from real industries with real assets, no matter what the totally discredited b
Fifi:
The commodities that you mentioned in your post just account for the containment dome, not the piping, pressure vessels (not mild steel there), pumps, valves, transformers, control wiring, and countless other components.
In addition, I did mention labor costs - which tend to go up rather dramatically if there is a tight market - as another important component.
My information about the line at Japan Steel is different from yours. There is more than a 5 year backlog already.
I guess I didn't make myself clear, I was talking about supply bottlenecks, not cost. Sometimes you can't just buy your way out of those.
At any rate we can take an end run around these shortages by moving to technologies that don't use them.
Rod,
The material quantities involved in anything else but the structural work are piddling compared to the transformation costs. The cost of nuclear is the cost of manufacturing, testing and installing and re-testing, etc. within nuclear specs and the cost of the manufacturing facilities themselves.
Example : a complete PWR RPV barrel - bottom and cover - costs more than $200M. The body is low alloy stainless steel - typically A508 class 3 Mn/Cr/Ni/Mo = 1.45/0.15/0.45/0.50. So including the high alloy internal clad, it's less than 5% "exotic" materials, about 25 tons, a few million dollars even assuming insane costs for Cr, Ni and Mo above $200,000/mt.
The real cost is the engineering and the time spent on the factory floor and in the plant.
My information about the line at Japan Steel is different from yours. There is more than a 5 year backlog already.
Yes but it's not a bidding war. You're in line or you're not. The cost is the same for everybody. $100M deposit. After that, Japan Steel's policy is strictly first come, first served.
It's a very temporary situation. The facilities simply aren't there until Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi and Doosan get theirs on stream. The orders are lining up so they are building it.
As I said, you have orders, you build the factory. You don't have orders, you graze cows.
Nothing happens overnight. It has always been true. Nothing special.
Also, I don't believe a word of the conventional wisdom on labor cost. It's just the normal modus operandi of US corporation. Whine. Whine. Whine. Me wanna tax breaks. Whine. Me wanna subsidies. Whine. Me no wanna pay ma employees. Whine. Whine. Whine. There are very few real shortages, only corporations who don't want to train and retain their employees.
The only serious shortages I can think of are experienced floor hands in things like heavy metal work and high level engineers. The US heavy industry has been pushed in the gutter for 30 years. It's going to be difficult to turn that around.
But the rest, electricians, metalworkers, carpenters, pipe fitters, machine operators, etc.? Puleeze? With the cratering in real estate and public budgets? It's just a question of training and certifications. And even for O&M, it takes at least five years between signing the first check and criticality. That's a lot of time to train operators and management. The Navy does it by the hundreds. No reason why the commercial sector cannot do the same.
The real real issues with labor cost in the US are the multi-million dollars salaries "executives" serves themselves at each of the 30 levels of subcontracting that doing anything seems to require in this country.
Fifi you obviously have absolutely no idea at all of how things work in the skilled trades. You cannot turn a plumber into a high-pressure pipe fitter with a wave of your hand. Like most human endeavors the skilled trades have hierarchies of competence, and while I'm sure people like you think that these are fabrications of the unions, nothing could be father from the truth.
It doesn't just take training, in the sense of watching someone or putting time in a classroom; it takes practice - lots of it, in situations where your work can be checked, and corrected. It takes s system where those who can't meet the standards can be found and redirected out of the trade and many other small things that you would not understand if you are not from that world.
Machinists, welders, and many of the other metalworking trades are not short of work, and these areas do not depend on housing or indeed the civil sector for jobs. There is a looming shortage in these trades in aerospace, millwrighting, and production support in many industries right now.
This has been cause by criminal shortsightedness over the last twenty years as apprenticeship programs have been shut down, (I mean after all they have only worked for 200o years) and the technical schools that were supposed to replace have failed to deliver a product that knows as much as they think they do and still requires two or three years on the job training before they are journeymen.
This is a real issue for which we are going to be paying heavily for and it will impact more than just the energy sector in the the future.
You should really check into your facts before coming to conclusions like these.
Great discussion Rod!! Kind of a carryover from the bloggersfornuclear on yahoo.
I raised this there and I am still concerned how this looks. There simply is no explanation and...it doesn't jive with Westhinghouse's own marketing on this. I want, in fact I *demand* to see a breakdown of this price.
The real question, and I think Charles Bolton raised this, is why is it so high for FPL and low(er) for TVA? Same materials, relatively the same labor costs. What GIVES????
Rod, you are the best number-cruncher in the pro-atomic blogosphere. Let everyone know if you find out more information on this.
David
David, cant the difference in the pricing be just price taken in year 2007 or year 2015 USD?
DV82XL
I have a very good idea from a previous life of how things works in the real world and how it takes about 2 years to bring up a steam fitter in the chemical industry, thank you very much!
That's what I mean by training, the way it's done everywhere else in the world. I'm not talking about the 3 day course "how to become a WalMart associate". I'm not that stupid!
To the largest extend, you are making exactly my point. "Oh my God, we cannot solve the problem right now, like yesterday! No one could have predicted! We are doomed!".
That's the kind of reasoning that's killing this place. 5 freaking years! What's so difficult about planning and running a project over 5 freaking g*ddamn years!?!
Fifi:
You are making a lot of sense and providing excellent discussion points. The good news is that there are companies and training organizations that are looking ahead a bit, but the quantity of those is rather shy of what will be needed. I completely agree with the fact that our current crop of American business leaders are, in general, far too concerned about their own paychecks and have an inflated view of the value that their B school, law school, or accounting schools bring to the corporation.
They have forgotten just how important a skilled and motivated work force is in producing items of real long term value. Training people is not a COST, it is an investment in the future capability to produce amazing things from the earth's raw materials. I also understand your point about commodities, but I include the shop time, engineering and skilled labor that is currently available as part of the supply chain items that are in short enough supply to be driving up the prices.
Like you said, the regulated utility industry is fairly well insulated against the costs as long as the PUC approves of their plans. For the most part, this has led them to a follow the leader mode of decision making that can be very expensive and is generally avoided in truly competitive enterprises.
A far sighted leader, for example, would have been locking in prices for their new nuclear plants 5 years ago when no one else was buying.
For an industry that emphasizes "lessons learned" programs, it sure looks like the established nuclear industry in America is repeating many of the mistakes of the first Atomic Age - at least on the business side. The constant drumbeat about how much the plants cost, how much help they need in the form of subsidies, and how much assistance they are going to need to train their workers is making normally supportive people question the value of the technology.
Many in the nuclear world think that people stopped supporting new nuclear projects because they became afraid of the plants. I truly believe that a far more important aspect of that gradual decision was that people, including financial people, got tired of every new plant costing more than the one before it and the public stopped supporting the projects when they got a rate INCREASE every time a new plant was rolled into the rate base.
If only we would learn those "lessons learned", we would be a whole lot better off.
Having been a journeyman pipefitter, and, working in a power plant as an outage coordinator, I can say...that most of you are correct even when you are arguing!
First, a typical Journeyman in the 'higher trades': electritician, pipe/steamfitter, control technician, etc is usually a 3 to 4 year apprenticeship. During that apprenticeship they are...doing journeymen work, under supervision of their journeymen. However, even though I was a Journeyman I was never quailified in an "N" work, which is a higher level of skill in both fitting, and welding (stainless, and then some...).
So, yes, it's an issue. In fact, usually, we're not even talking about fitting, but welding. Stainless steel welders not only have to be trained in nuclear work and stainless, but both certifications have to be maintained for 90 days or they have to qualify. A real pain in the butt.
Secondly, the other area is qualfied high voltage electricians. Most electricians are inside wiremen. They work on 'commerical' (office buildings) or residential, almost alays 220v and below, some 480v. We've had this problem in San Francisco finding elects that can work controls, running huge bundles or wires or setting remote transmitters. The only place where this is not a problem is where there is a lot of industry, specifically refinaries, where this kind of work is more common.
My view is that while it IS a problem, it is one that is very surmountable. They are only now building ONE NPP to my knowledge and as they come on line over the next 10 years, scads of well paid apprentices wannabes will be knocking down the doors. In California, the wage part of an electrician in the union is over $40/hr. Apprentices start at over $25 and with some major projects already completed, a down turn in the economy, I suspect there will be plenty of the trades available for builing our energy future.
David Walters
(IBEW 1245)
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