[ RadSafe ] Nuclear Bid to Rival Coal Chilled by Flaws, Delay in Finland

[Nielsen, Erik]

There won't be any "nuclear renaissance" unless the construction
companies can get their act together.  Wall street and the bond market
will price them out of the market.

===============================
 Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Martin Landtman hunches forward in his
shirtsleeves as a June storm on Finland's Baltic coast drenches the
construction site of the world's most powerful nuclear reactor. As
project manager for TVO, the joint venture buying the plant, Landtman
has weathered far worse annoyances than rain. 

Flawed welds for the reactor's steel liner, unusable water- coolant
pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation already have pushed back
the delivery date of the Olkiluoto-3 unit by at least two years. 

``Substantial delays, I think you can use that word, yes,'' the
54-year-old Landtman says. 

Olkiluoto-3, the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the
1986 Chernobyl disaster, is also more than 25 percent over its 3
billion-euro ($4 billion) budget. 

If Finland's experience is any guide, the ``nuclear renaissance'' touted
by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable
alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a
generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors
cost investors billions of dollars. 

Full Article at
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601090&sid=aFh1ySJ.lYQc&refer=f
rance#
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Erik C. Nielsen 
Senior Scientist 
Remote Sensing Laboratory 
P.O. Box 98521, M/S RSL-47 
Las Vegas, NV 89193-8521 

http://www.nv.doe.gov/nationalsecurity/homelandsecurity/frmac/default.ht
m 

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