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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."
ACME?
Um, no; "joules per second" is a rate, which doesn't imply a time interval. A bullet coming out of a gun might go 600 miles per hour, but that doesn't mean that it covers 600 miles worth of distance. Likewise, I've worked on megawatt lasers that were a lot smaller than you might expect, because they only delivered a megawatt for a very small fraction of a second. A laser that delivered a million watts for a full second would be a big beast indeed.
Without another time term to get from a rate to a quantity, you have no idea whether '27 megawatts' is for a picosecond, a second, ten minutes, or from now until the heat death of the Universe.
If you wanted to (and I'm not going to do it out), you could easily calculate the maximum duration of a 27MW pulse into a bathtub-sized container of water, before you'd boil the water. (Or do the same thing with some other coolant medium; sodium or lead or what have you.)
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"Total annihilation of earth"
Taxpayers paid for the research and development, taxpayers insure against any sort of nuclear accident, taxpayers pay for the waste storage dump, taxpayers pay for security to keep this out of terrorist hands, so it seems quite logical that private industry should keep the profits from selling these things. What a great deal! I'm always amazed how libertarian-leaning people can be such fanboys for nuclear power. Nuclear power requires vastly more big government involvement at every step of the way than any other form of power.