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Texas can take lessons from Finland’s nuclear power plant delays | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Dallas Business News

Texas can take lessons from Finland’s nuclear power plant delays
Dallas News BUSINESS December 21, 2008By  By JIM LANDERS jlanders@dallasnews.com

OLKILUOTO ISLAND, Finland – Three times a day, thousands of workers from across Europe tramp through the snow and rocks here to a bulbous concrete hulk looming beneath an aerial ballet of construction cranes.

The round-the-clock shifts are trying to resurrect nuclear power, an energy option that fell out of favor in 1986 when the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl reactor exploded.

The revival is not going well.

The new Olkiluoto plant is struggling with cost overruns and delays. These are especially vexing in Finland’s deregulated electricity market, where utilities can’t just pass on the added costs without risking a flight of customers to other power suppliers. The plant is at least two years behind schedule.

TVO, the Finnish utility buying the plant for $3.4 billion, expects the French and German builders to eat cost overruns and replacement power purchases. Those are likely to be well above $1 billion. The builders, in turn, blame the utility, and the two sides are headed to arbitration.

These sorts of problems exasperated North Texas ratepayers 20 years ago when the twin Comanche Peak nuclear plants in Glen Rose were under construction. Costs ballooned from $800 million to more than $11 billion.

Texas can take lessons from Finland’s nuclear power plant delays | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Dallas Business News

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

December 22, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs