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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."
It sounds a lot like the 10MW Toshiba "nuclear battery", which has a pretty good chance of being built.
The engineering is perfectly feasible, it's just a matter of whether or not it is cost effective (it probably is, or will be soon at the rate energy prices are rising), and whether or not people would be willing to live next to a tiny reactor (the real problem). Beyond that, it's just a matter of working through the massive bureaucracy of getting licencing from the NRC.
The notion of having a completely unmanned reactor seems like a recipe for disaster though. The Toshiba plan of keeping a few people nearby to ensure security and to monitor the supposedly fail safe systems seems safer.
eclecti.cc
Al Qaeda? Show me Al Qaeda. Not the US-Government spun version - but actually who they are.
Yes, I do not think Al Quaeda constitutes a horde. I'm willing to be proven wrong by independently verifiable facts.
To get into the question of murder, one has to dig deeply in international policy and the Geneva Convention - which are not very sane or moral. The Geneva Convention says that if you're a big country, you can divide your people up into fighting and non-fighting groups - and when the fighting groups kill people, it's not murder. That system only works for the big countries, and the smaller groups don't buy it. Death is death, killing is killing.
If you want to go down the line of "morality" and talk about who has killed whom, the US loses that argument quickly. Do you think what the US has done in Iraq is sane?
The military commissions act makes it possible for the US government to designate ANY PERSON an enemy combatant for terrorists acts or (more importantly) aiding or interacting with any other person who acts against the interests of the US. SIC. Once designated, that person basically loses their rights, and enters a kangaroo court system that can include secret evidence, prosecutors talking privately with the judge, sealed testimony from anonymous accusers, etc etc etc. A big black fuck-you box.
As I said, you have to go read it, carefully.
Neither are portable reactors. In fact I find it hard to believe that an isotope generator can deliver 20MW+. No way. It will have to be fuelled with something so short lived and nasty that there is no way in hell it can be contained in a "bathtub" size unit. In fact modern tech will not be able to manufacture its guts.
As far as portable reactors are concerned there are some on the market.
Russians are in the process of productising the reactor which is currently fitted to Arktika class icebreakers into a mobile powerplant. You just float it into a suitable bay anywhere and run cables to the ground. Bingo - a 340 MW at your disposal. They even have pending options (not firm orders AFAIK) from various small island states in the Pacific. By the way - if I have to chose between a reactor on land and this, the mini-ship definitely sounds like a better option. It is cheaper, better and easier to dispose of the waste.
They Russians also had a the portable nuclear reactor proof-of-concept as far back as 1980-es. The thing was mounted on an "octopus" truck like those used for ICBM launch. The details are still classified so I have no idea what they used. The pictures I have seen said that it used a fast neutron reactor which is something I find hard to believe in. None the less, the system existed and AFAIK several prototypes were manufactured.
Nothing new here, move along.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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I'm the last to get panicked, I just think that radioactivity is not meant for 'mass distribution'.
Then you should be seriously pissed about coal-fired electric generation. Do some reading before jerking your knee.
You're breathing radioactive waste right now, and it didn't come from a nuke plant.
Do I think what we are doing in iraq is sane? Well I'm writing this message from iraq, and Yea I do. Did we make a lot of mistakes? Sure.. and as it stands, some things are better then when we started, and some things are worse, but If things are bad, they are the exception, not the rule. Also now the iraq people have hope, which is something they never had before.