[quetzalcoatl]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/busi ... share&_r=0

Westinghouse Electric Company, which helped drive the development of nuclear energy and the electric grid itself, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, casting a shadow over the global nuclear industry.

The filing comes as the company’s corporate parent, Toshiba of Japan, scrambles to stanch huge losses stemming from Westinghouse’s troubled nuclear construction projects in the American South. Now, the future of those projects, which once seemed to be on the leading edge of a renaissance for nuclear energy, is in doubt.

“This is a fairly big and consequential deal,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “You’ve had some power companies and big utilities run into financial trouble, but this kind of thing hasn’t happened.”

Westinghouse, a once-proud name that in years past symbolized America’s supremacy in nuclear power, now illustrates its problems.

Nuclear woes are not exclusive to Westinghouse. General Electric, a pioneer in the field, has scaled back its nuclear operations, expressing doubt about their economic viability. Areva, the French builder, is mired in losses and undergoing a large-scale restructuring.

The new administration doesn't look that inviting to nuclear power advocates.

...the nukes have plenty of reason to be wary of the incoming administration, which may ultimately be less instrumentally favorable to nuclear power than either the Obama or George W. Bush administrations. That’s because the chief selling point the nuclear lobby has been promoting in its arguments for atomic energy for the last several years has been that their electric generating plants don’t produce carbon dioxide.

While new nukes are horrendously expensive, the industry’s argument has been that the conventional economics don’t recognize the value of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Without U.S. nuclear plants, the country’s carbon emissions, which have been on a downward track, could turn upward. And the best way to turn the curve further south is new nuclear plants.

It doesn’t look like the Trumpeters will care very much about the carbon footprint of nuclear power. That’s because The Boss (and most of his acolytes) don’t view global warming as a likely or significant issue. Trump campaigned on the erasing the pains of the coal industry, putting Rust Belt coal miners and steel workers back to work. He championed greater access for fossil fuel developers to federal lands and offshore areas. His campaign’s support for nuclear was pro forma, about what one expects for Republican candidates.

If Trump’s energy agenda – as best we can define it at the moment – succeeds, nuclear plants are likely to be less competitive on conventional economic grounds for many years to come.

http://www.powermag.com/blog/trump-bad- ... ear-power/

Technological advances are bringing the installed cost of solar down to fossil fuel levels. And unlike coal, natural gas, or oil, solar continues on a rapid downward price trend. The safety concerns of nuclear are unlikely to effectively met by a government hell-bent on de-regulating everything in sight.

[AFAIK]

China will pick up the slack. It has plenty of plants in operation, under construction and planned for the future, including R&D into future generations. Demand for electricity and pollution are enormous enough, and civil society is weak enough, to prevent them from turning their backs on nuclear.