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Toshiba Builds Ultra-Small Nuclear Reactor
DeusExCalamus writes "Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet, could change everything for small remote communities, small businesses or even a group of neighbors who are fed up with the power companies and want more control over their energy needs."
Have a fallout, closer to home. Toshiba Micro Nuclear.
Someone should have told these students that they could get one of these and not have to peddle.
liqbase
How did they manage to shrink a nuclear reactor to only two dimensions?
I'm sure the US government would have no problem with people buying these, no problem at all.
now they don't have to rely on bicycles for the supercomputer energy needs!
40 years x 365 days x 24 hours x 200kW x $0.05 = $3.5bn
Ok, so I guess it wouldn't run at full capacity all of the time, but even if you half it, or quarter it, it's still a big number.
Slightly more silly: if you were to use the MIT students from the previous article and you assumed they worked 24 hours a day to produce 200kW, and you paid them $10 an hour you'd need 1600 of them and it would cost $5.8bn over the same time period.
I guess that's why we have nuclear power.
I'll wait for the eventual smaller form factor in a year though. Gives me time to save for a Delorian. Those flux capacitors don't seem so extraneous right now.
How are they planning on fuelling these reactors? I somewhat doubt, with current paranoia about terrorist "dirty bombs", that they'll be willing to use uranium, which seems to me to somewhat defeat the point of a nuclear reactor...
I wonder if their cost/kWh figures includes Greenpeace terror campaign against nuclear anything..
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I heard about this yesterday, and searched the Toshiba's main website for a press release or anything. I found nothing beyond the article. If Toshiba are really doing this, i thought it would at least be a headliner on their website.
Anyone?? I'm wondering if this is even real.
my search here (you may have to filter for medical results)
Lots of advocates for solar/wind/other renewables oppose using nuclear power to help against global warming because "They come in only one size: Extra large". This one pretty much mitigates that argument. Of course, Toshiba has done this before, with the Galena project...looks like they are really pushing miniaturization of nukes.
I don't buy it.
There are two possible explanations for why middle eastern nations might want nuclear technology. One is that they want to blow us up. The other is that there are vast areas of their counties that don't have electricity. We accuse them of wanting to destroy the planet and we're the ones who ordered 300 new coal plants this year, knowing that industrial coal is the single largest contributer to greenhouse emissions. We should be helping Iran build nuclear power plants, not encouraging them to keep burning oil for power when peak oil and global warming are looming in the future.
If you take it apart, does that void the warranty? As usual, I'll wait until I can read the reviews on amazon.com Someone needs to tell me if it comes with a cheap plastic housing.
Something along this design could be used on the moon or mars. It would be nice to have guarenteed power there with 40 years lifespan. But it would be nice to see MW, rather than KWs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You must be american. Letting unscientific fear rule your opinion.
It's actually quite safe. Here safe meaning in the same sense that cars are safe, even though their engines are in a near constant state of explosion.
We have come quite a far way since the days when nuclear reactions where unstable accidents waiting to happen.
It's funny that today, all you have to do to make something unpopular is put Atomic in front of it, and all you have to do to make it popular is to put nano in front of it.
Had they called this a nanoscaleparticleenergyconverter instead people would be flying off their chairs screaming "What a wonder!"
The claimed cost of power is $0.05/kwh.
A gallon of gasoline has something around 35kwh. 35kwh from this thing would cost you $1.75. If you had a fleet of electric vehicles, you could continually charge batteries off this thing and swap them out.
A 200kw reactor would produce the equivalent of almost 140 gallons of gasoline per day. Effectively this is more energy, if your vehicles operate in the city, because you don't expend energy idling the engine. You could operate a fleet of electric cabs, locking in the equivalent of a $1.75/gallon energy cost for the next forty years.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I broadly agree with your sentiment, if the Iranians' wish for civilian nuclear power was genuine. But the UN has already offered to supply them with all the fuel they need for their reactors, as long as they shut down their enrichment program. Iran has so far refused to accept this offer, and enrichment is the only important technology that nuclear power has in common with nuclear weapons. So it's unclear what their true intentions are.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
>I live in an area where that is not near any water, has only intermittent sun and wind so another power source is necessary. One question: why? Everyone will need to think harder about the cost effectiveness of their living situation in the future. Google is thinking about this now, and setting up data centers near large sources of hydro power. I suppose you could grow trees and burn them, like my parents did in the 1970s when heating oil got expensive. Not environmentally friendly because you still get CO2 out. There are very efficient stoves that burn corn products now.
Option number 3 :
They've run out of oil and don't want to collapse entirely. Despite all their high towering, and despite their supposed "faith" they know very well their economies will collapse in months if the oil runs out.
Which is going to happen in no more than 15 years (probably less). (and their incomes from oil will drop exponentially during this period). They need fuel. 60 years worth of fuel and they need it in storage containers now. And they need money. Thousands of times more money than they have.
Gee, I guess I'll be selling all my extra power to the grid.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
That works both ways. Imagine being an American and being told that you would have to rely on the Iranians to supply you with the fuel to run your nuclear reactors.
... oil ...
Oh wait
I got one of these and, honestly, it only puts out about 180 kilowatts out of the box. I managed to overclock it to 250 kilowatts, however. I just finished the case mod. I'm using plexiglass so you can see what's going on inside. It also weighs a lot less without all the lead, which was pretty unattractive. But now Toshiba is saying I voided my warranty and won't give me tech support. I just want to find out why my dog started glowing in the dark...
Will it blend?
I wish I was clever!
Solar is not viable in high latitudes as the same winter that makes more difficult to have hydro (because water freezes) or thermo-electric (because you have to haul the fuel from somewhere) generation also makes the daylight last few hours.
Low-service nuclear is the way to go in these cases.
If I had to live off-grid, I would rather have solar or solar-thermal where I live (a mile south from the Tropic of Capricorn), but nuclear also seems a nice option for "power-anywhere problems".
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
you work for the white house? According to wiki, it is STILL going in. "greenies" have had nothing to do with it. In fact, according to the wiki, just this year, the town confirmed it.
My suggestion is that you go back to preaching about the WMD that Iran/Iraq/NK has. It is idiots like you that cause more issues than the "greenies". They voice concerns. You and your neo-cons voice lies.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html
So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.
They even built and tested nuclear powered aircraft both in US and USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
Wonder why it never went anywhere ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Temperatures this past summer held in the mid nineties with 80% humidity. Winters can be just as brutal with lows near zero and winds gusting to fifty. You are going to find very tough to lower your power consumption "by an order of magnitude" under those conditions. There are no easy or obvious alternatives for the neighborhood, the nursing home, the single family residence.
10 years ago, this article would have abounded with threads on how cool this is, and "I wonder if you could make a Beowulf cluster of those."
Now, it's all, nuclear is bad, nuclear is evil because "The terrorists might get it".
Listen to yourselves. You've eaten the terrorist propaganda the government has been feeding you, AND YOU LOVE IT.
"We can't do this because it might help the terrorists."
"Yeah, that's cool, but what about the terrorists?"
"If it weren't for terrorists, this would be awesome."
George Bush loves you guys, he's got you on his side and you don't even realize it.
Submarines have had very small, very safe reactors for decades. Unfortunately, the technology is highly classified and will most likely never be made available for commercial uses
My brother-in-law was on an attack sub and I got to tour it (my father in-law actually got to drive it!). We weren't allowed aft passed a certain point, but give where we were in the sub, you could get an idea of how small the reactor was. Always thought it would be fun to put those reactors to use for domestic power generation, even if just for special purposes like powering server farms.
-Chris
This is interesting. As stated in the previous nuclear reactor article entitled "China goes Nuclear", uranium is kept in small pebbles made of graphite, which is a neutron reflector material.
Both reactor designs have a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity" simply means that an increase in core temperature will cause a decrease in core power. If the temperature increases too much, the core will shut down. I don't know if the pebble-bed design does, but the 4S still produces heat after being shot down (I'm not sure if the pebble-bed reactor does), so there must be some mechanism provided to remove the generated heat.
More interesting facts: pebble-bed reactors use helium as coolant instead of water, and helium is much more resistant to becoming radioactive - this deals with the possibility of having a radioactive cloud in case of an accident. The 4S, in comparison, uses liquid sodium as coolant, allowing the reactor to operate 200 degrees hotter than if it used water. This means that the reactor is depressurized, as water at this temperature would run at thousands of pounds per square inch.
However, I'm not sure how safe sodium is, and we all know what happens when sodium comes in contact with water - and heated sodium explodes just as easily when it's exposed to air. Helium, instead, is an inert gas.
IANANS (I am not a nuclear scientist), but the pebble-bed design seems very well-thought, requiring less control mechanisms than the 4S, so I think I'd go for the pebble-bed design.
Is there any nuclear scientist around to give more info and comparisons, and correct any mistakes I may have made?
They may view it as a loss of sovereignty regarding power generation. My guess is that Iran, as a member of OPEC, is well-aware of what can go wrong when you depend upon other countries for energy.
Or nukes. Obviously, MAD is just effective now as during the cold war.
After crawling the web a bit I found a few more interesting links about Toshiba's "Micro-Nuke" technology. First an article from 2005 about a similar Toshiba reactor running on liquid Sodium that was slated to be installed in a remote Alaskan village some time before 2010. This doesn't appear to be the same reactor as mentioned here on /.
A blog entry with more information and links about this and other small reactors.
It seems to be fairly safe, though I can't imagine the red tape they'll have to get through in order to begin installing them, especially in North America. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has about a 60 month process to certify a reactor from the time the application is filed, Toshiba probably has a head start on this application from 2005 with its "4S" mini-reactor, but this new Lithium version will probably need its own application process. They plan to build these things at least 30m underground, encased in steel and concrete walls that probably put most bank vaults to shame, so I don't think tampering will be a major issue.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Wonderful deal, isn't it?
Iran only has to build expensive reactors, and buy the fuel from the US (or whoever provides it) which will of course be sold at a profit (so it's not exactly a huge concession on the provider's part)
That'd work right until the provider decides it doesn't like something going on and says "No more fuel for you!".
Then what happens is that Iran gets rolling blackouts, and gets stuck with lots of expensive hardware they can't use, because if they had enough power without the reactors they wouldn't be building them in the first place.
Yes, I don't understand why anybody wouldn't sign up for a great deal like that.
The one from 3 years ago was Toshiba's "4S" reactor ("Super-Safe, Small and Simple") designed to produce 10MW of power (much more than this new "micro reactor"). In other words the 4S is a real nuclear plant (albeit a small one), complete with a small staff to run it. Wikipedia link.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Anyone who knows anything about nuclear reactors knows that control rods certainly do not initiate reactions. They regulate or halt it by absorbing the neutrons that cause it. Maybe the author at "Next energy news" should become a bit more familiar with his/her subject before writing about it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
There were a number of building size reactor designs proposed in the 1980s.
I once worked for a company that designed an intrinsically safe urban reactor designed to make hot water. We had convinced the city of Helsinki to buy it and were within hours of signing the contract when the Chernobyl Reactor accident occurred. Helsinki would have used it as a district heating plant big enough to heat all the buildings in the city.
Nuclear reactors are much better at making hot water than they are at making electricity. Heating is a major consumer of energy in many locations. Therefore, replacing a fossil fuel heat source with a nuclear heat source is more beneficial to the environment than replacing an electric power generator. There are other applications, aluminum smelting for example, that need copious quantities of heat, not electricity per se.
I can just imagine the operating manaul:
"Thank you to use Nuclear-Friend. The main characteristic in machine of control rod moves in with slim middle, can nimble neutron dependable work send, of via sea warmness thusly turbine twist out machine-wind.
ALERTNESS, magnet-imprison with ionisation threatening badass. Fleeting bioluminescence in bird appendage observation, conjunction Cherenkov neon likeness, linking chain of no command (barking!) to blinking indications. Personages of vicinity ascending fucking with sparks! Ability detriment remove with "fast-neutron-sheilding-blanket" (slowly neutrons with alacrity) to mammalian sex babylove machine faulty. As packing box inside includes dosimeter for life-spirit guard dog is. Un-normal witness with e=mc2 of cloudy fungus c.10km bigness, warranty glue not connected."
Any nuclear reactor, by definition, must use radioactive material. This material can be used to make a "dirty" bomb, thus, all such material is highly regulated by the US Government. Some apartment building will NOT be allowed to have one of these. The security that would be required would price it right out of the market. Perhaps one could be built under the police department in a good sized city?
One could make a logical argument regarding the true danger posed by a dirty bomb, but the US Government seems to have completely abandoned logic as a basis for any of their actions.
The Islamists of the Middle East, who have the largest share of the world oil reserves, seem to have conveniently made it very difficult to get approval for their main energy competitor. In the end we may come to understand that their objective is financial rather than ideological.
As for U-235, I think one of the most inventive uses I've seen is powering a nuclear saltwater steam rocket engine for interplanetary use. Just watch where you point it, the exhaust is really nasty.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
...that's where we were headed. What a stupid idea. It's like giving people PCs. They have more computing power than they actually need. They waste more power because it's inefficient. They cause more problems because they are clueless about maintaining their PCs and get rooted more times than I care to imagine. They are stupid enough to take their PCs in for repair at big box shops that employ neanderthal techs (not all of them, but most of them are stupid goons) and then pay an arm and a leg for a completely reformatted system at best and a poorly patched system at worst. But most of all, these people who seem to think they need all this computing power do VERY little with their systems and probably use about 3% of what the systems are capable of. Now apply that to local power generation paying attention to the fact that a reactor need fuel and careful maintenance:
They have more electrical power than they actually need. They waste more electrical power AND nuclear fuel because a reactor for a small group of homes is inefficient. They will cause more problems (explosions, radioactive contamination) because they are clueless about properly maintaining their nukes and will likely come very close to meltdowns more times than I care to imagine. They will be stupid enough to trust the repair and maintenance of their nukes to companies that will employ neanderthal techs who are poorly paid and have little care for making mistakes. (Hell, if a phone company can blow up a house by hitting a gas line [this happened in Strongsville Ohio in August 2007. Look it up.] and very likely shirk all responsibility, you can just imagine what the private sector will do with nuke maintenance) But most of all, these people who seem to think they need locally generated power for their cul de sac will like use VERY little of the power generated and the rest will be wasted in the name of convenience.
Yes, I believe that energy companies are vultures and most of the CEOs and administration in those companies should be lined up against a wall... But I also think that part of the equation to really being smart about electrical energy consumption comes down to conservation. Instead of Toshiba making nukes as a first line of energy crisis solutions, they should instead be working on ways to make their devices more power efficient. Even if it means INCONVENIENCE for the end user. ALL of the consumer electronic companies should be doing this. Make sure all devices actually turn completely off and drain NO power when a user is not using it. Make sure that all computing devices that need to have a saved state do so with solid state drives and better battery technology. Re-work home computing so that all you need is one central resource module that hosts CPU, RAM and storage and interacts with wireless devices that are the "terminals" or "thin clients" while still providing something that feels like a regular PC experience. Make sure that one central module does NOT run an OS at all, but simply hands out resources to the authorized devices. That way you can buy one decent unit that might last a decade instead of new PCs every two to three years. And GET USED TO INCONVENIENCE. It's better than destroying the planet. I'll happily ride the bus to work instead of drive if it means I'm one less polluter. (I do ride the bus to work for just that reason) If you can't bring yourself to inconvenience yourself, you've failed in your civic duty to others.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o