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Portable Nuclear Battery in the Development Stages
Xight writes "The Santa Fe Reporter has up an article about a portable nuclear reactor, about the size of a hot tub. Despite it's 'small' size the company that is planning to develop the product (Hyperion Power Generation), claims it could power up to 25,000 homes. 'Though it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy, Hyperion doesn't like to think of its product as a reactor. It's self-contained, involves no moving parts and, therefore, doesn't require a human operator. "In fact, we prefer to call it a 'drive' or a 'battery' or a 'module' in that it's so safe," Hyperion spokeswoman Deborah Blackwell says. "Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."' If all goes according to plan, Hyperion could have a factory in New Mexico by late 2012, and begin producing 4,000 of these
reactors."
Actually, it's fairly typical to rename things so they don't contain "scary" words. Like how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) became Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Because people don't like things with the words "Nuclear" or "Reactor" anywhere close to them.
I call "Fear mongering crap."
It is exactly this attitude that has Americans cowering in their homes while their country is being raped from inside.
Why exactly should "we" hope that these are not mainstream? Becuase "we" fear that there are all those "evil" people out there (somehwere?) to get us and try and kill us? That attitude is fabricated crap, generated from the kind of attitude present in text like this. What exactly do you mean by "high level mischief"? Please explain. Are YOU implying some specific person would/will take out the radioactive material and use it to harm people? That's a catchy implication, but not real. Who? Show me all these boogymen. Show me there are hoardes of people out there sharpening their knives to destroy civilized society. It's a bullshit lie. To me, flippant fear mongering like that is most of the problem here, not some boogyman called from thin air to support the fear-based attitude you're spreading.
For me, the sad thing about alternative energy is the way that all the technologies compete instead of cooperating. Different parts of the world demand different approaches and different mixes. For instance, as a thermal generator this reactor could usefully complement thermal solar arrays, so that (simplifying) the array heats the fluid in the day and the reactor heats it at night. A conventional nuclear reactor would not work like that because it has to be too big, i.e. it is out of scale compared to the solar source. If the waste heat could be used for area heating, it would work well in far Northern latitudes where heating demand is greater than power demand.
I can't help but think that this is one case where serious joined up thinking is required. If the US Government can spend 0.6% of the Federal budget on NASA, which is speculative research, isn't it worth spending 0.6% on safe alternative nuclear reactors rather than driving up the price of corn? Rather than try and substitute oil with uneconomic ethanol, why not try to substitute oil used for heating with heat from nuclear sources? The effect would be the same. A policy that oil should only be used for transportation, and that vehicle efficiency should be progressively increased, would reduce dependence on the Middle East just as quickly, or quicker, than pork barrel farm ethanol projects, and would have more long term sustainability.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ahh, the ubiquitous 9/11 homage. Within MINUTES! A bit off topic, but OK...
Specific to your point, who did paid them? Really. Go find out. Please, post it here - becuase to date, no one has tracked it down, at least that I have found. The non money trail is a big gaping hole in the investigation that didn't happen.
More to the point, who gives a shit? Let's put things into perspective:
2.4 Million people die in the US every year.
120K die in accidents
600K die of heart disease
10 times as many people die, every single year from Septicemia. Ever hear of it?
Let's not even start with numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of US troops abroad, before and after 9/11.
Fasts:
There are crazy people.
Carzy people will kill other people.
You can't stop the crazy people without becoming a totalitarian police state and taking away freedoms from everyone.
9/11 was a big deal, mostly becuase it was blown way way out of proportion. It was like 20 people. Hardly a hoarde. Hardly even a blip in the mortality of the US. It was the media and opportunistic politicians that made 9/11.
What those people did on 9/11 is exactly why fear mongering about nuclear material is so ridiculous. They did a low-tech thing, designed as a symbol, and over the next 6 years US citizens did all the rest. The vast majority of the damage caused to the US after 9/11 and because of the "9/11 mentality" happened because of Americans who were susceptible to fear and control - NOT from those people who flew the planes.
You ought to go actually read the military commisions act. See what the US has come to.
Then think hard about infant mortality in the US and compare what happens with dying infants each year to the 9/11 attack.
Please don't patronize, it's unattractive.
You wrote: If I can think of it so can any asshole with the funds and the determination to pull it off. And one of the assholes will get lucky.
This is the core fallacy of fear mongering: Taking a rare or non-existent threat and treating it as credible. It turns out there are thousands of really cheap ways for small groups to cripple modern society. Criminals are really good at coming up with them, and so are think tanks the government pays to research such things. Guess what: there is no way to prevent them! But - amazingly, none of these scenarios are happening. There is a lot more to it than "I can think of it so it must be scary."
I believe radioactivity is a great way to generate electricity. The French figured this out long ago, and have the safest and cleanest energy on the planet. If engineered and maintained well, nuclear plants are safer and more environmentally friendly than any other mass power generation system.
It seems to me there are enormous, global industries working on "better ways to make electricity" that you refer to - so please enlighten us all, what are these ways you refer to? How should human society safely and efficiently produce power for all 6 Billion of us?
Perhaps, the US might start working on ways to have fewer (asshole) people in the world angry at them and wanting to blow up their cities with dirty bombs? That might be a good place to start.
While you are correct that terrorist threats are over stated there are other good reasons for hoping that these batteries are not widely used, looking at past events can show why. The use of radioisotopes to power thermoelectric generators is not a new idea. During the 1960s to the 1980s the former Soviet union used Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) to power lighthouses and other remote equipment along the Russian northern coastline. These worked well for the most part during their service life, however the Soviet union collapsed and most of the RTG's in place were forgotten. Since then these devices have posed a considerable pollution risk to the environment as their casings degrade over time. They have also been associated with several deaths as people unaware of the dangers they contain have come into contact with them in remote areas. Many old RTG's are still in the environment today long past their design life. The Environmental Foundation Bellona has an informative article about old Soviet RTG's.
It will be interesting to see if future American companies and governments are as keen to clean up old RTG's from the environment as the current Russian government are today. I think that apathy is by far the greater danger than the terrorist.