This whole thing sounds like an "Innovator's Dilemma" moment...
Rod, have you read that book?
Kirk:
One of my favorites. I see our current situation as an innovator's opportunity.
I suspect that price increases for components in this sector would probably be due to supply pressures rather than greed. In other words if there are end users trying to out bid each other for a delivery position, it is not the fault of the supplier.
DV82XL:
Of course, I agree that bidding wars are not caused by supplier greed. They are pretty enjoyable for the supplier, however, and really smart suppliers know how to help them happen through skillful marketing and well planned capacity additions or subtractions.
If you spend much time - like a few decades - reading trade publications you will find that the word "overcapacity" is a real boogyman for most large industries.
Desire for profit is not greed, but an eyes wide open recognition of the motives behind business decisions is also not a search for a conspiracy. As a literature student and a long time fan of mystery novels I learned a long time ago that one has to dig a bit to find out WHY people choose to say, write, and do things.
OK. I should make myself clearer.
Overcapacity comes in two flavors, the first where the market is flat and more can be produces than can be sold, and then there is overcapacity that is a result of schedule. The last is illustrated by the ski resort model where in a hotel might have a 50% occupancy rate year over year, yet for the months that there is snow be overbooked.
Something similar to the latter is starting to show up in nuclear build projections, most prominently in the large high-pressure vessel issue that’s being batted about the web right now. I do suspect that there will develop a secondary market in delivery positions for these items as has happened before, most notably in aviation. Note that these are not necessarily connected to the final price of the item itself.
That’s not to say there won’t be some simple classic supply and demand price increases from suppliers that are not suffering capacity issues, but all that has to happen is to see the prior effect in a key item or two and real problems can develop.
This is part of the point I was trying to make in a previous thread on the labor issue. Just because there is a surplus of people in some trade doesn’t mean that you can blithely predict that labor costs will remain low or that this talent will be available if demand rises, and it is simply wrong to think that you can rapidly induct and train more in a short period of time, just like you can’t make a large forge overnight ether.
These are real issues that IMO haven’t been given the airing they should be. I am also going to restate that the only way to avoid this is to look at designs that won’t be as drastically impacted as the current ones are now. These would be smaller powerplants that could be centrally fabricated and shipped to sites as turn-key installations; if we don’t bottlenecks will end the nuclear renaissance before it gets going.
DV8
Trouble is that the whole energy thing is a central banker scam, and central bankers don't like nuclear.
Check out Al Gore's web site that he's been pumping, We can solve it. org. No mention of any sort of real solution, assuming that Global Warming is a real problem caused by co2 like nuclear or widespread mass transit.
They just want to stick us with a bunch of junk technologies that will never reduce the damnd for coal and oil, which is the real reason that they are against nuclear, that and they are mostly suggestible idiots.
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