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Port-A-Nuke

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are designing a self-contained, tamper-resistant nuclear reactor that can be transported and installed anywhere in the world. In 'US plans portable nuclear power plants,' New Scientist writes that the sealed reactors would last 30 years and deliver between 10 and 100 megawatts. The largest version would be about 15 meters high and 3 meters wide, with a weight of about 500 tons, allowing for transportation by ships or very large trucks. The DOE thinks that this kind of nuclear reactor -- named SSTAR for 'small, sealed, transportable, autonomous reactor' -- would help to deliver nuclear energy to developing countries while significantly reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation associated with the use of nuclear power. What do you think of this idea? Is it a good one or a crazy one? Leaving a nuclear reactor in a developing country which can potentially become unstable during the 30 years of service of the reactor doesn't seem to be terribly safe. Read more before deciding. Anyway, there will be no prototypes before 2015."

5 of 791 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic


    will they run Linux?

  2. Imagine ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    a Beowulf cluster of these! or, powered by one of these, at least!

  3. you = teh suxx by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You forgot to say FP :
    "Fuck Piquepaille !!!"

  4. Re:Tamper Resistant? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Just you, go back to being a weenie.. move along and such.

  5. The Reactor with the Surprise Inside!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Yea Buddy!

    Ya gotta think outside the box. Just this morning I was reading this guy who said we gotta wipe out Islam for the good of the world cause their all terrorist by religious default which got me to thinking how big-o-job that might be so I looked up how many Muslims we would hafta kill for starters and the numba came back sumptin like a Billion five. So then I whip out my trusty calculator which tells me that if'n we could kill a Muslim a second sustained it would take nearly 5000 years to get em all but of course most of those Muslims would have died of old age long before that and would have had babies and their babies would have had babies and so on and so forth. Obviously we would havta kill Muslims at a much higher rate if we would have a chance of getting them all. Of course I don't think we could get em all but we could probably get most of em.

    As it turns out there is about an equal number of Christians in the world, maybe a few more, and Christians generally have much more lethal technology at their disposal so if we could get most of the fightin age Christians to saddle up with all the high tech they could carry we should be able to depopulate the more densly populated areas with a fair amount of efficiency. But that would be a logistical nightmare for one thing and after you wiped out all the cities and bulldozed all the Mosques your left with taking to the country side where efficiency drops off significantly. Not a good plan.

    Now bio weapons look good but nobody has developed ethnic selectivity suitably well at this point let alone religious choice. There just isn't a good marker for that which means we have to put alot more money into research and development before a decent bio weapon becomes available. Wishful thinking.

    Right now about all the world has stockpiled that would be suitable for mass Muslim extermination is nukes but there in lies another problem. How many Muslims you can kill with nukes depends on how many Muslims you can pack in the kill zone and it is hard to get enough Muslims to pack into a small enough area to get a decent yield. Especially since the big cities would be first to get the delousing treatment as their ready made easy and convenient but while most Muslims are backward, they ain't stupid and so it would be hard to get to bunch up much after that.

    This is where these free reactors are so bloody brilliant. Especially when you put a remote detonated hundred megaton warhead in each one. Hell we could even go one better. Instead of just a self contained fully autonomous electricity generating reactor, we could also build in a cell phone system and a digital television relay and broadband internet. Muslim only, good for a few kilometers. You could even make the whole thing look like a mini Mosque. Call it Allah Electric. Then when everybody has got comfortable sittin round the air conditioner watching 'Leave it to Beaver' reruns to the hum of an electric goat milker, switch on a little instant Christianity.