а причины?

Добыча перестаёт быть выгодной

И в Канаде производство снижается...
(беззвучно) фсе в Казахстан!

Вообщем, американцы при Трампе, предлагали на экспорт построить десятки атомным блоков на Ближнем Востоке. Вот только все те советники, которые это проталкивали, уволились.

Строительство АЭС по нашим технологиям в Штатах - это из разряда "благих пожеланий".

Так для информации, если надо дам источник с другого форума.

Если честно, эта история про десятки совместных реакторов выглядит абсурдно.

Саша, а вот в этой заметке идёт речь о достройке начатого АРЕВА завода по производству МОХ-топлива (то, что они планировали в рамках СОУП заменить на "разбавление"), или это какой-то отдельный проект?

По ситуации 1) информация слишком отрывочная. Но могу предположить, что группа кредиторов пыталась на каком-либо основании создать для себя более льготные условия при банкротстве, чем для прочих кредиторов. А суд это отверг, поскольку более льготные условия для одних означают ухудшение условий для других. Пирог-то один на всех.

Yay. Now get your shit together, you bloated, rudderless, talent-wasting, soul-crushing, MBA-infested, industry-wrecking, gangrenous dinosaur. You can polish your shelf of JD Power awards for political infighting after you've finished Vogtle 3&4.

If @WECNuclear followed the mid-1990s practices of @Entergy, they'd be back in their feet in 2 years. Fire 80-90% of management, convert it from an MBA feeding trough back to an engineering firm, clear obstacles to getting meaningful work done & leverage technical talent.

Replace the entire HR organization; destroy the notion that engineers are "fungible" interchangeable generic warm bodies, an insidious destructive MBA fiction. Develop & reward expertise.

Destroy the stack ranking system; it's based on flawed statistical assumptions & punishes workers for being in bad environments. Deming had it right: if there's a problem, look at the environment & work process. Understand & fix those; that's management's job. Don't churn staff.

Put IT under engineering and convert it to a service organization dedicated to supporting billable work not just standardizing & locking things down purely for IT's own convenience. Move to product-focused DevOps model from Arrogant Printer Overlords model

These ideas are anathema to @WECNuclear's entire culture of treating workers as a contemptible gray slurry and cost center while rewarding an infighting class of petty nobles. A Nerf version of Game of Thrones meets The Office.

Doubt you can fix that corporate narrative. Maybe best to just burn it all down and start over. Problem is, there are a lot of families trapped in the castle dungeon. Burning it all down will hurt a lot of people chained to the walls. I know; my cell just got burned up.

There's no love lost between me and @WECnuclear. Never wanted any association with them but they own the company I worked for & helped destroy it over past 9 years. Their corrosive corporate culture ate away at us & now the firm is disintegrating. Too incompetent to be truly evil

But I've worked in nuclear companies that turned that around. It took a merger and decisive, smart, often hard decisions to fix things. It was easier to fix Gulf States Utilities because they had a much more obvious business focus: make money selling electricity.

I can't tell you what WEC's business focus was or is. It wasn't selling reactors. It wasn't building reactors. It did those things but I can't say that was the company's focus. Maybe focus was on covering up they couldn't do either of those things profitably. Ask Danny Roderick.

I'll blame NRC & DOE & Wall St. & Congress for making it almost impossible for nuclear firms be viable let alone flourish in the US. That's true but not all of the story. The sad fact is that the nuclear companies themselves are to blame for the vast majority of their problems

Whose job is it to make sure a company or an industry is vital, viable, and competitive? You pick a sector that looks fertile and you work it. You compete on cost, quality, technology, reliability - that's under your control as the business owner. But you have to pick one.

You can't do everything well; the result of trying is to do everything poorly. If you get to a certain size, you can start terraforming the playing field. Look at Disney & copyright extension; GHC & Herbalife and DSHEA (supplement regulations). Those were huge industrial wins

In the case of Disney, they had the resources and brand strength to screw over Americans for generations just to keep monetizing a cartoon mouse. My point is that with brains & resources, you can make friends and influence regulation.

In the wake of Fukushima, I reached out to @NEI to ask how we as an industry could have neutral experts provide factual information during the next crisis and break the system of perverse incentives that left media to book non-experts like Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, & the UCS instead

What came out of that conversation was that @NEI served two masters: pro-media donors who wanted more assertive promotion & engagement and anti-media donors who wanted nuclear to stay out of the news period, positive or negative.

The latter were utilities with a mix of generation assets that just wanted to sell electricity in peace, not fight to improve nuclear business climate. And as an industry group, @NEI has to consider that outlook. I don't like it but I completely understand @NEI's position.

The upshot of that is the nuclear industry is hamstrung in its ability _as a group_ to effect any meaningful change on financing and regulation or even in engaging with the public. It stays cloistered & ineffectual. The nuclear industry is an industrial category, not a community.

Self-driving cars will kill more than advanced nuclear will but people are generally in favor of them. There's robust discussion about safety, control, social & economic effects, not always to the vendors' liking. But the public is engaged, interested, and generally positive.

You can be damn sure that as fierce as the competition is getting, the vendors and the firms relying on using fleets of autonomous vehicles are working with each other as an industry to ensure R&D and sales can take place. Lobbying, working with @NHTSAgov and insurers, etc.

The autonomous vehicle vendors talk to the media, they field hard questions, they engage. When there's an incident, they're responsive. You'd be wrong to chalk it up to just Elon Musk. Tesla behaves like they give a crap about their product & the public. That's not just Elon.

The nuclear industry behaves like it's still 1980. Utterly impersonal & top-down. Expects workers to give 110%, to nod & smile at corporate pronouncements, to be good procedurally-compliant team-player worker bees, willing to do 'casual overtime' because it's 'professional'

If everyone just follows the rules and lines up in their hierarchy, you might one day get a cost-of-living increase in your paycheck again. Because 'you know how it is'. No, you can't telecommute. The only flexibility your work schedule is how much more than 40 hours you'll work

The major change in workplace amenities is that we've replaced the free industrial-grade drip coffee burning in the Bunn-O-Matic with a Keurig and K-Cup vending machine. (This is a true story BTW)

The industry is cheap, petty, fearful of its own shadow, cloistered, regressive, manipulative, with a planning horizon of 12 weeks. Everything is top-down; if it wasn't envisioned or controlled from above, it isn't happening. Innovation is punished; IT ensures that.

Even in a viable industry, it's hard to be successful with that workplace culture. Now add the responsibility of working in a high-integrity (life- & mission-critical) field. Cost and stress go way up.

Why would anyone want to work under those conditions? A Catholic sense of duty and suffering?

The organization will blame all its failures on outside forces beyond its control, never even attempting to control them in any meaningful way. Or it will blame its staff for not giving 115% 25/8/366.

So they make half-hearted changes in minor things that couldn't actually help even if they were done sincerely & perfectly. There's no impetus to learn or change in a culture that doesn't value those things. It has to be forced from without.

This technology is too important to the health, welfare, and comfort of the world's population to be left in the hands of people who can't figure out how to make decent coffee.

Or worse, those who don't care about making decent coffee, don't understand why people want it, or even recognize that they do. They've been successful just going through the motions. For decades.

Aside: Their takeaway from the last two posts is "The company will succeed if we provide different coffee". Cue the All Hands meeting to introduce Coffee Pillars of Success program. Everyone gets a cheap logo travel mug. Bunn-O-Matic disappears, to be replaced "soon"

Handle falls off mug at Western Zirconium site. Company-wide "stand down" to pause and reflect on importance of safe coffee use and personal responsibility to inspect mugs. Coffee mug safety mentoring training is scheduled for everyone. Maximum coffee temperature limited to 80F

Logo Keurig machines installed 3 weeks later. K-cup vending machines arrive 2 weeks later. Three days later an employee notes the coffee temperature is 125F and Keurigs are temporarily removed. Mandatory coffee temperature monitoring training is scheduled for all employees.

Modified Keurig machines arrive 2 weeks later. No budget to install them. All Hands meeting to announce executive reorg, no COLA increase this year (5th year in a row). 30% of new Keurig machines will be installed in next month, budget comes from cutting hand soap expenditures.

Keurigs found to be vending coffee at 75F (to be extra safe). Remaining Keurigs installed over next 6 weeks, budget coming from bathroom tissue allotment. All Hands meeting to announce low productivity, 15hr/wk "casual overtime" is expected to meet financial targets going forward

How much of this do you think is parody?

How much of this describes where you work?

How much of Dilbert is about justifying learned helplessness?

When was the last time you saw Dilbert or Wally or PHB update their resume and actually try to make their lives better?

If you're the person greenlighting a "Coffee Pillars of Success" program, do you even know what your company does? How people work? Do you even care? Or are you comfortable being so insulated from profit-center projects and people?

Nobody in my tale of "Coffee Pillars of Success" was overtly stupid or evil. A problem is this notion that global, shallow, one-size-fits-all campaigns can have any meaningful effect. What were the metrics? What would have predicted success or failure? Maybe start there

For a year, all WEC could talk about was its crash program to develop a small modular reactor (SMR). Completely within WEC's capabilities. Hell, America's first dedicated nuclear power plant (Shippingport) was a WEC SMR.

Ignore for a moment that it was originally designed to power a gigantic, mercifully-cancelled aircraft carrier. It's still an SMR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_United_States_(CVA-58) …

Huge fanfare within the company heralding the bold new project (an also-ran to B&W's now-shelved mPower, the leading SMR design at the time). The WEC SMR was now high priority. Except...

Except there was no internal budget for it. Strong encouragement for divisions to work on it but managers' bonuses were tied to meeting financial targets, not working on unfunded "high-priority" projects. Was this accidentally or intentionally not considered?

It's hard to see this as a mistake but I can't rule it out. As someone running a business, how do you not see that? I'm a lowly engineer but even I see that. But no, they keep hyping this project internally for a year or more.

I mean, hey, we work on accident analysis software, to get the design licensed you need accident codes to model the design - wasn't there something we could do to support the SMR project. Nope. It's like we - or the SMR project - didn't exist.

As far as I know there are no codes capable of modeling SMR accidents in the US. The MELCOR guys at Sandia will probably say they can model anything, which is probably true if you have infinite time and cash.

But no money went to developing MAAP via EPRI for the WEC SMR. There was some brief work for mPower but that stopped long before the whole mPower project was shelved. No idea what NuScale, Holtec, et al are doing

I saw tons of hype but zero material commitment. Hype is easy. Hype is fun. Hype is necessary. But it's not sufficient. And without backup, hype is a dangerous diversion. Puts focus on something that nobody can do anything with instead of things they can.

Somebody with more free time & motivation should look at the timeline of WEC's SMR hype and when the AP-1000 projects first started to unravel. Not speculating; just curious.

But big picture: if you can't compete in your current business in the current environment, you have options. Change your market, change your business focus, change the playing field, sell the company, or gracefully fold it.


I want WEC to finish all 4 units in the US and transform themselves into a company worthy of their namesake. Otherwise, I try to avoid thinking about them. Anything I _feel_ about them is irrelevant.

I have no use for their failed American "enterprise" model, which is less about WEC than it is about the US and the state of management/HR/IT as professions.

It pains me to use "management/HR/IT" and "profession" in the same sentence. No sense of duty, no code of ethics, no standards. Just feather your nest, cover your ass, and be sure you're first to the lifeboats. If that means kicking a kid in the face, too bad. Better him than you

Has anyone kept track of the number of senior WEC execs that have been laid off as a result of the failed AP1000 builds? Have any been fired? Or do they all have dirt on each other? Last I heard, they were fighting to retain their bonuses. BONUSES FOR WHAT?

Well, they might get sad and leave to work for a competitor. THEY LOST 18 BILLION DOLLARS! THEY LITERALLY HAVE A NEGATIVE VALUE TO THE TUNE OF TEN ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. WE WISH COMPETITORS WOULD HIRE THEM; LET GENERAL ELECTRIC EAT EIGHTEEN BILLION DOLLARS OF LOSS.

Aside: Danny "Pronounces it 'Nuculer'" Roderick was ex-GE and a sixth-round pick for WEC CEO. Gotta give GE props for that. They couldn't have planned it any better if they tried.



Anyone just tuning in, you're not going to hear me badmouth nuclear technology or even the AP1000. It's not about the tech. It's about not learning from history, how business is conducted, how people are (mis)managed, and how an industry and a nation develops learned helplessness

If this burns bridges, maybe it's because the river ran dry long ago, parched by drought, the wood dry-rotted until the bridges were crumbled tinder. The road long disused and overgrown with brush, leading nowhere. You'd need hundred-year-old railway maps even to find the bridges

Tell me what future the US nuclear industry has. What opportunities am I missing if that bridge burns? To be another SAP ID in another rudderless, top-heavy, unproductive, talent-wasting arena, trampled roughshod by jousting managers?

Tell me that working for GE would be any better. Or working for any of the other half-dozen engineering megafirms that rule the landscape.

Всё пропало.

https://twitter.com/arclight/status/943906352480636928

Поговорили сегодня с приехавшими в Москву на конференцию американцами, как в Штатах отреагировали на это предложение Трампа/Перри.

Реакция весьма негативная, на самом деле. Употреблялось даже слово ridiculous.
Дело в том, что предложение полностью противоречит базовым принципам республиканской партии в сфере энергетики (сводятся к невмешательству государства в дела энергетики).
И теперь совершенно непонятно, как его будут принимать, если в партии Трампа с ним многие не согласны.

На мой взгляд, отличная новость для МБИР.

Вот я, собственно, имел в виду второй пункт. Будет или нет построен американский проект — это ещё большой вопрос. Но таким удобным предлогом выбить деньги у нас должны все подряд начать пользоваться.

Было бы очень полезно прочитать квалифицированное сравнение нашего проекта с американским по экспериментальным возможностям. Что в петлях будет, что в каналы можно поставить, есть ли пучки и какие?

Вот я, собственно, имел в виду второй пункт. Будет или нет построен американский проект — это ещё большой вопрос. Но таким удобным предлогом выбить деньги у нас должны все подряд начать пользоваться.

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The United States is leading an initiative with several other governments to promote nuclear power and encourage investment in new nuclear technologies.

The initiative, launched on Thursday by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette with international partners, aims to “highlight the value of nuclear energy as a clean reliable energy source”.

The partners are Japan, Canada, Russia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Poland, Argentina and Romania.

https://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKCN1IP1PO-OCATP
к чему бы это?

Было 12*50 - стало 12*60.

если мне станет известно хотя бы об одном случае сокращения доплат к пенсии сотрудникам, - вы в Америки замучаетесь пыль глотать,

Сами то поняли с кем связались?

простите их. Они сначала с вами связались а теперь уже поняли, что им капут. Пыль глотают, мучаются...

А вот этот вот консорциум - это более рыхлый и частный вариант национальной компании "полного цикла" или что?

Кажется, DoE начинает припекать, и они начинают делать правильные телодвижения. Если не они, то кто?
Насколько успешно — будет интересно посмотреть.

Но фактически - да, это "рыхлый" вариант нацкомпании по голове топливного цикла (гос+частники), но для решения конкретной задачи дать рынку уран с обогащением 5...20%.