“Like Selling a Million Sonatas”

#24

TOK, the Wang-Meister is notoriously tight about giving out HTs. What you need to do is badger him about his spelling mistakes until he relents.

Sorry, that should be:

“Like selling a million billion Sonatas”, as per article.

Why didn’t the U.S. have a chance at the deal? The U.S. nuclear reactor industry has been a bit held back since the Three Miles Island incident stopped new reactor construction in the states.

This is not the only instance of the US shooting itself major-league-style in the foot when it comes to energy policy.

Check this out:

R. & D. expenditures have grown faster in China than in any other big country—climbing about twenty per cent each year for two decades, to seventy billion dollars last year. Investment in energy research under the 863 Program has grown far faster: between 1991 and 2005, the most recent year on record, the amount increased nearly fifty-fold.

In America, things have gone differently. In April of 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned that the hunt for new energy sources, triggered by the second Arab oil embargo, would be the “moral equivalent of war.” He nearly quadrupled public investment in energy research, and by the mid-nineteen-eighties the U.S. was the unchallenged leader in clean technology, manufacturing more than fifty per cent of the world’s solar cells and installing ninety per cent of the wind power.

Ronald Reagan, however, campaigned on a pledge to abolish the Department of Energy, and, once in office, he reduced investment in research, beginning a slide that would continue for a quarter century. “We were working on a whole slate of very innovative and interesting technologies,” Friedmann, of the Lawrence Livermore lab, said. “And, basically, when the price of oil dropped in 1986, we rolled up the carpet and said, ‘This isn’t interesting anymore.’ ” By 2006, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. government was investing $1.4 billion a year—less than one-sixth the level at its peak, in 1979, with adjustments for inflation. (Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, nearly quadrupled during that time, to more than twenty-nine billion dollars.)

Scientists were alarmed. The starkest warning came in 2005, from the National Academies, the country’s top science advisory body, which released “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” a landmark report on U.S. competitiveness. It urged the government to boost investment in research, especially in energy. The authors—among them Steven Chu, then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now the Secretary of Energy, and Robert Gates, the former C.I.A. director and now the Secretary of Defense—wrote, “We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost—and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all.”

They called for a new energy agency that could spur the hunt for “transformative” technologies. It would inject money into universities and companies and would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, modelled on DARPA, the Defense Department unit that President Eisenhower founded in response to Sputnik. (DARPA went on to play a significant role in the invention of the Internet, stealth technology, and the computer mouse, among other things.) ARPA-E, they hoped, would shepherd new energy inventions from the lab to the market, bridging the funding gap that is referred to in engineering circles as the “valley of death.” Congress approved the idea in 2007, but President George W. Bush criticized it as an “expansion of government” into a role that is “more appropriately left to the private sector.” He never requested funding, and the idea fizzled.

Other plans withered as well. In January, 2008, the Bush Administration withdrew support for FutureGen, a proposed project in Illinois that would have been the world’s first coal-fired, near-zero-emissions power plant. The Administration cited cost overruns, saying the price had climbed to $1.8 billion, but an audit by the Government Accountability Office later discovered that Bush appointees had overstated the costs by five hundred million dollars. House Democrats launched an investigation, which concluded, “FutureGen appears to have been nothing more than a public-relations ploy for Bush Administration officials to make it appear to the public and the world that the United States was doing something to address global warming.” An internal Energy Department report had warned that cancelling the project would set back the advance of carbon-storage technology by “at least 10 years.” An e-mail between officials emphasized that Bush’s Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman, “wants to kill” FutureGen “with or without a Plan B.” (Bodman denies that costs were overstated.)

After FutureGen foundered, China broke ground on its own version: GreenGen. If it opens as planned, in 2011, China will have the most high-tech low-emissions coal-fired plant in the world.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/21/091221fa_fact_osnos?currentPage=4#ixzz0b7BEbYNx

#38
Overall, I have to be counted as impressed with what KEPCO was able to do here. They went head to head with more established players in France, Europe, the U.S. and Japan and came up on top at the end of the day. Korea had ox charts, steam trains and maybe a few electric street cars left over by the Japanese 50 years ago and now exports nuclear reactors. It wasn’t an easy journey. Korean companies had to beg, steal and borrow (and buy) technology from reluctant foreign companies in order to get there.

I was talking to my dad tonight and he mentioned something about Chung Ju Yung. Apparently my grandfather, who was a banker, knew Chung Ju Yung back when he was a nobody. Chung tried to schmooze with the bank managers, persistently taking them out to restaurants and buying them drinks, because he needed a loan. He looked like a common laborer, dark-skinned like someone who worked mostly in the fields and had very calloused hands. My grandfather asked Chung what assets he had and Chung replied: “I have 5 trucks.”

#50

A couple of days ago the Chinese government passed a law mandating that all state-owned utilities purchase power generated by renewable sources regardless of the cost. This can never happen in the US.

#47

I don’t think it is a loss making deal. I think they decided to sell the reactors on thin margin. Not sure what the margin is on the service and maintenance contract. But KEPCO also has a stake in the local utility, as part of the deal, and there is an additional revenue stream coming from the sale of the power distributed into the grid from the reactors.