Is Nuclear Power designed to be a viable corp? (Little Upsilon)

I, like many other players, have been excitedly building nuclear power corps. They look good on paper. They should be profitable once their market is established... However, I have one major problem with them: they don't seem to be a stable link in the supply chain. Instead, nuclear power is used only by countries.

Why is this, when regular electric power is used by nearly every corp?

I think the GMs ought to re-visit this, and perhaps consider a better way for standard electric and nuclear power to compete with each other, apart from presidents manually choosing to buy nuclear power for their countries every so often. Hardly anyone does manual ordering for their country apart from weapons/ammo anyways.

Unless nuclear power is better integrated into the existing chain of supplies and products, it will always suffer from an inconsistent demand and become a fail corp when it has the potential to be one of the better ones (again, at least on paper).

I second that...great post Petra

From what I remember, nuclear power is being added to electric power usage by countries. So when you see the quantity of electric power in stock, it should be a combination of electric power and nuclear power.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, down the road I believe that electric power will have a CO2 tax involved, where as nuclear power will not, because nuclear power is considered greener than electric power.(electric power uses oil generators, which produce pollution?)

I was actually giving this a thought myself at one point, might be groovy to have a series of options for corporations and or countries.

1. Use Oil based electric power.
2. Use Nuclear power.
3. Use whichever has highest availability.
4. Use whatever is cheapest on the market.

Toggle it for corporations/countries, etc. fire and then forget. I expect some folk would switch nuclear only, while most others would go straight for cheapest.

I reference highest availability seperately, since the largest available amount may not be the cheapest for whatever reason.

Keto - You are correct, it is added to electric power. Wild's point however is that nuclear power corporations can not remain viable if only countries are purchasing it and not corporations as well and in addition, it can not remain viable if it is only purchased manually by a player because most players do not purchase their electric power for their countries manually.

White Darkness - That's a great idea and I would hope that something exactly like that is in the works for when the CO2 tax comes along. However in the meantime the system should be set up to somehow automatically purchase nuclear power in combination with electric power in order to make these corps viable for the time being.

May be the GM should include Nuke power station disaster to the natural disasters program?

I also recon it should be only implemented in countries that build more than 1 Nuke power station per 7 million population.

The savings made by not paying the environmental clean up tax (CO2 tax) will easily cover the costs of the Nuke disaster if you deploy Nuke disaster teams.

If you do not deploy a nuke disaster team, the savings made from not paying the tax will be used up paying for the 1% loss of earning for 20 game years due to the long term environmental problems caused in the area of the Nuke power station disaster.

No.

1. Natural Disasters suck as it is and serve very little purpose in the game. The GMs should get rid of them.

2. Anything that adds superfluous costs (costs without adding anything to the game) should be considered DOA.

3. How many nuclear disasters can you recall off hand? Carbonyl and 3-Mile Island. That's in 59 years of nuclear power and with over 436 power stations worldwide.

source: http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm

# There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power - Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. One was contained without harm to anyone and the other involved an intense fire without provision for containment.
# These are the only major accidents to have occurred in more than 12,700 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation in 32 countries.

source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html


In conclusion: BAD IDEA, Nix.

Everyone has cancer in the Delaware Valley...I know it is reaching... but 3 mile island is a hot subject with a rise in Cases of Cancer in this area. As now Asbestos claims in NY,NJ are now being attributed to the Collapse of WTC and huge amounts of asbestos into the atmosphere.

Mesothelioma....

Myself, I'd rather not see a CO2 tax implemented. Partially because I've seen a lot of reports about how most of the "global warming" panic can be best described as a steaming pile of bollocks.

Throw in the fact that there's a small minority of scientists who cannot find any conclusive evidence that humanity's "tiny" co2 emissions since the industrial revolution have had any notable impact. They're ignored since it doesn't make good press for getting elected to office.

Heck, I read one report that suggests we've become too clean and need to release more sooty-goodness into the atmosphere.

Even if that is not the point of this thread, i was just wanna something here...

It is clear that nobody knows enough on this subject, and clearly a lot of people like politicians have taken advantage of "going green".

That does not however means it is all "bollocks".

As for those reports, statistical error and data manipulation is just so easy that nobody has a right answer, and that is from both sides. I have looked at those reports and the ones i saw are just as bad as others on greenhouse effects.

And that last report you are talking about is "bullocks"(i like that word). If we have no effect on global warming, then shooting more crap should not change a thing on "global cooling".

******************
Anyways, as for the topic here, nuclear seems to provide more units of "energy", assuming 1 unit of nuclear power = 1 unit of electric power. But 1 unit of nuke power should provide MORE than 1 electric power, but more importantly i believe nuclear power corps should end up with the same product as electric power, because unless there is another purpose, they both are used for electricity.


Just a suggestion... i just dont see how nuclear power is useful for any corp types.. you need electricity..that applies to countries too.

If the nuclear power is just a new product that is C02 free and that is it's only purpose compared to electric power, then you can leave the name, but i would agree that corps should be able to use them too.


Another suggestion that seems more logical in my head is that corps should buy electricity from the country they are in. In turn, countries have to buy their needs AND their corps needs.

All corps would automatically have a contract setup with the country they are in, and be able to setup what quality they want, and the country would order it(or produce it).

Players could cancel these contracts if wanted and setup their own contracts.

I don't know anybody who does not auto order these days in their countries, so i don't think it would cause much difference.

It could be complicated to change all that however for the GM, but just throwing out the suggestion.

I have found the new corp types added recently to be pretty much dogs. SMFs are occasionally profitable but like all of these new corps when they go bad you will be losing 20B-30B/game year.

I am treating the Upgrade corps like they were strategic and just contracting the production to myself.

Is there any use for for the weapon/ammo upgrades yet? Not that I have seen, no wonder the corps are doing poorly.

As for the power corps: The two generating corps should be playing on a level field, obviously with different supplies, production (Kw/Hr), prices etc, but the product - electricity - gets put into the national/international grid, from where countries and corps can buy and consume it. If one form of production is considered more efficient then this would be reflected in a greater output for a set supplies cost.
If the game were to introduce CO2 and haz clean up taxes then these taxes would be the responsibilty of the country hosting the generating stations. It could also be implemented that an enterprise running a generating station in a foreign country could be held responsible for a proportion of these taxes, incorporated into the 'country resources used' I would suggest. And, it would be easy to add further power generating types of corps, like wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, or just one 'alternative' energy source.

Surely this is more like the real world?

Crafty.

+1 to what crafty said, especially the "but the product - electricity - gets put into the national/international grid, from where countries and corps can buy and consume it. If one form of production is considered more efficient then this would be reflected in a greater output for a set supplies cost. " part

This is the problem: nuclear energy is only converted into regular energy after it has been purchased. It does not sell on the world market as such, and therefore it has no stable demand: it is not part of the supply chain that regular EP is in, nor is it in any supply chain since countries/corps can't even voluntarily set their default automation to buy nuke power instead of regular power.

Now your cooking CC.

Helloa White Darkness.
Hope all is well. I hav'nt re-registered my countries on LU for a while.

Anyways........CO2 is just a small part of the greater environmental destruction that man is doing to the futures Eco system.
But I think, to get the public focused on the damage each of our activities are doing to the Eco system, our leaders needed some focal points. CO2 and recycling.

Personally, I would say it should be our consumption that we should be focused on. For thats what doing all the damage.
But unfortunately we all know that without our consumption of their pointless products, most of our leaders would have no power.
So thats why it's CO2 thats the big enemy. Remember. Alot of our capitalistic leaders would love for things to go on the way they were. And some will do what they can to make sure it does.
But ultimately it will be their Grandchildren they will be lying to. For when their Grandchildren ask 'what did you do Granddad to save our Eco system?' What can they say?

Believe me my friend. I would also love to think CO2 and other dangerous gasses weren't worth worrying about. But who am I to risk the well being of Mother Nature? Thats why I'm turning Vegi
We are the guardians.

There should be some environmental threads somewhere. Mines called Desireless and another is called Environmentalizum, debate.. If you want to chat some-more about whats going on with global warming please by all means resurrect one of them. It's been ages since we've had a good Eco debate on the forum.

While I am for good stewardship over the Earth and do not advocate wanton destruction, I would like to point out that the whole "the Earth has warmed" argument may have more to do with the 10 year period that has been picked to "norm" the graph than anything real.

If I were to call one of the warmer periods in Earth's history the "norm," it would look like we were in a cool spell.

This whole debate assumes that there is one, single, best, and ideal temperature for the Earth. That sounds debatable. No if we want to cooler b/c we are afraid of losing our coastal cities that is another thing.

But I would like to point out if ocean levels are going to be rising as quickly as "they" say, I ought to be able to buy beach front property for a whole lot less than it is going for right now.

I lost 14 nuke power corps from my ceo in the SimYear on LU.

This is unacceptable !!

When new products are introduced, they must be profitable.

I remember when the new weapons and ammo quality corps arrived, I built a bunch of them and within a week, they were gone !

Why would you make the assumption that they must be profitable upon introduction? Your own following statement explains why that has rarely occurred.

A new corp type is introduced. A new demand for said product is slowly introduced (ex: a few weapons needed solid missile fuel. countries could now order nuclear power). And every country in the world decides they want to build one or more of these corps as soon as possible, and surprisingly, supply outstrips demand, and they start failing.

This seems quite realistic to me. I also built quite a few Solid Missile Fuel corporations when they were introduced. You want to speculate on a new product, you have to expect to get anything from an outrageous profit to a spectacular loss.

On the general topic of this thread, however, given that all power, no matter the origin is stored as Electric Power, I do feel that you should be able to switch your country/CEO over to different power sources, or to set a ratio of the various power sources (i.e. i want 60% of my power from oil, and 40% from nuclear).

Why Daelin? Do you have any say where the electricity you consume comes from? Do you want a multitude of cables serving your house?
You could make your country and its corps entirely self-sufficient in power and build the ratio of Nuclear/fossil fuel power plants you desire. Anyway, the point of this thread is that the two corp types dont compete evenly. Read Petraarkanians "This is the problem" bit.

Crafty.

While I'm obviously unfamiliar with other places in the world, in many places in the U.S., you do have a say in where your electricity you consume comes from. You're allowed to pick from a multitude of providers, all of whom specify their specific breakdown or power source generation.

I do agree that Wild has eloquently stated the problem. Based on it, I see two solutions:

1) Have alternative power corporations all produce "Electric Power". This would co-mingle all the power before selling, causing all power to sell for the same price. This would probably be the simplest solution (and not unreasonable).

2) Allow consumers (corps, ceo's, countries) to choose which type of power they wish to consume. This would allow users to select the type of power they wish to promote. However, in the end, basic laws of economics would result is most power sources being the relative same price in the end (the majority of users, when confronted with either auto buying 50k/GWh for Oil-based Electric or 30k/GWh for Nuclear-based Electric, assuming it's easy to do, will choose to buy the cheaper product, raising it's price, and dropping demand for Oil-base Electric).

Both these methods would put alternative fuels into the supply chain, which is what is necessary to make Nuclear power a viable corporation.

#1) A CO2 tax is an extremely silly idea to implement in the first place. In the second, if there is going to be nuke power then there should also be coal power. Of course, coal already is a product just like uranium. So why the redundancy with nuke power plants?

#2) Countries should have the right to decide if they want to be part of a "cap and trade" scheme. I suspect most would opt out of such nonsense. For the hard core environmentalists, they could always trade CO2 credits among themselves. Maybe the Enviro countries could get a boost to the health of their population if they go green.

Wouldn't it be keen to have Hydro-Electric plants. Perhaps with an extra-long build time, that could be interuped by war or natural disaster. Maybe even limiting it to countries with large rivers or mountains, or even non-costal countries.

I don't know if it would be practical to have it be a variable, but, the plant should be A HUGE cost, of course, even by SC standards. The result, however, would be extremely cheap production costs for power. To make it worthwhile, it might be necessary to sell all power interchangeably, as others have discussed.


Just like to also add; Copper is an extremely underused commodity in SC.

Of course, I say this because I built a Copper mine in my newer country after seeing how ubiquitous Aluminum was as an input into many industries. Not bothering then, to check on what industries used Copper.

IMHO, at the very least it should be used in Building Materials corps. One would think that every weapon corp would also use it, and not just the four listed. Computers, Home Equipment, Machine tools, Industrial Equipment. I realize it's in Elec. Comps, which many of these corps use, but..they all use wiring also.

Just thought I'd throw that out there, as well.

There are no mining operations (mines).
There are no natural resources.

what you you built is a copper factory.

Reconstituted soybean paste makes a good dielectric.

Spart.

Seems you just don't like my posts.

Seems to me, also, the category which lists Aluminum, Copper, Stone, etc. as corp.s,,bears the title of "Mining".

Even if you insist on the pedantic of what we build, one would assume that noone would build an Alumina processing plant very far away from the Bauxite mine. Granted, everyone can build an oil Factory, or a Copper Factory as you put it. I don't think anyone reading here, however, mistook the meaning of what I had to say.

Cheers.