Mini nuclear power plants to be on sale by 2013?

[david dissadent]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

It will be unstealable because it will be burried underground.

Or so they say. Like nutters cant buy a JCB.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The raiders used a JCB digger to smash through the perimeter fence and the gates of the Dome to reach the Money Zone, where the De Beers diamonds, worth an estimated £350m, are usually housed in a secure vault.

source

 

[soulman]

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

 

[soulman]

 

[david dissadent]

The chaos you could cause by the mere act of stealing! The amount of effort that would have to be put into finding it, and scanning for where your dirty bomb might be.......

It would be a prime target for a blackmailing operation or perhaps a drug cartel as some kind of bargining chip.

 

[DogorKat?]

10 cents a watt? That has to be a typo surely?

eta: i think i worked it out. I was thinking of 10cent/watthour. I'm guessing that it refers to output capacity not usage cost

 

[Hocus Eye.]

The, nuclear reactor itself may be no bigger than a garden shed. This won't generate electricity, only heat. The heat then needs to be conducted to a heat exchanger through which passes lots of water (from an unspecified source) which becomes steam which is fed into a turbine which turns a shaft which rotates in a generator which creates electricity which is fed into a transformer connected to some control gear and linked to wires leading to the houses.

After ten or seven years when the reactor needs re-fuelling, do you pop into Tesco Extra for some new rods?

The Guardian article is rather lacking in detail, I know it is only a Sunday story for idle reading but an inadequate piece of reporting.

 

[TheDave]

Most papers come up short when reporting science stories. I'm just glad it isn't more pop psych bullshit.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

There've been schematics for these sort of things for years, never thought they'd ever build them.

 

[rich!]

To be fair, you could do something like this with a pebble bed reactor.

Though most of the "how do we prevent the bad guys turning it to evil" sound as plausible as J. Smith on ID cards...

 

[stowpirate]

Are they suggesting the reactor fuel uranium is not that dangerous and can be handled? If so this might be true to start with but after a few years of operation will it not breed weapons grade plutonium?

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

 

[MikeMcc]

Are they suggesting the reactor fuel uranium is not that dangerous and can be handled? If so this might be true to start with but after a few years of operation will it not breed weapons grade plutonium?

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

Probably not enough to be realistically possible at customers sites, if deployed systems are exchanged and sent back to the manufacturer then there may be an element of scaling that would allow the fuel to be reprocessed.

 

[soulman]

The article also mention that Toshiba are looking at a much smaller nuclear reactor:

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

 

[soulman]

The biggest unresolved problem with nuclear energy is what to do with the waste.

 

[longdog]

This article was amended on Monday November 11 2008. $25m divided by 10,000 is $2,500 not $250. This has been changed.

The nuclear industry on the ball as ever

 

[MikeMcc]

The biggest unresolved problem with nuclear energy is what to do with the waste.

Which is a political problem, the technology is pretty well understood.

 

[G. Fieendish]

The article also mention that Toshiba are looking at a much smaller nuclear reactor:

The first Toshiba nuclear reactor is supposed to be installed somewhere in the middle of Alaska in around 2 years time...
The reason for it's installation, is it's cheaper to install the reactor, then to run a main power line spur to the location in question...

 

[soulman]

What will it be powering?

 

[G. Fieendish]

The entire town of Galena, Alaska...
Said Toshiba 4S Reactor is intended to have a 10 Megawatt output...
(The only snag, is that said reactor is cooled by molten Sodium, i.e it's a liquid metal cooled reactor, & potentally can't be refuelled, due to intense Gamma Radiation, produced by the isotope Sodium-24).

 

[soulman]

I'm not going to pretend I know the ins and outs of nuclear technology, because I don't. So any idea how long this reactor will be able to fuel the town in Alaska? And a supplemental question for yourself or anyone else: Is it likely to put the townsfolk at risk in any way?

 

[MikeMcc]

The entire town of Galena, Alaska...
Said Toshiba 4S Reactor is intended to have a 10 Megawatt output...
(The only snag, is that said reactor is cooled by molten Sodium, i.e it's a liquid metal cooled reactor, & potentally can't be refuelled, due to intense Gamma Radiation, produced by the isotope Sodium-24).

Never understood the facination with liquid sodium reactors. Why the fuck use a medium that reacts with air and water. It hardly seems to be a fail-safe design!

 

[soulman]

And burying it underground is supposed to make it somehow safer.