Portable Nuclear Battery in the Development Stages 439
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."
Re:A lot of propaganda going on here ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The real market for these... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:2, Interesting)
One would have assumed that people from the nation with the biggest arsenal of nukes, would have a clue. Guess not.
What makes you think any government(USA or otherwise) would *ever* allow any significant quantities of radioactive material to be sold to just any random civilian individuals??? Are you really that retarded?
First of all, the massive oil cartel that owns the USA government(and George Bush's soul), ensures that any nuclear energy alternative gets associated with things going ka-boom without rhyme or reason.
Which is silly when you consider, that for a Chernobyl, you also have a Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [wikipedia.org], proving that accidents are possible in any scenario if proper care is not taken. And funnily enough, the protest groups to the glee(or perhaps with sponsorship of) oil cartels, have no problems with nukes being stored in locations close by(because if they protest *that*, they will be hauled off as traitors and shipped off to Guantanamo) but if the same material is used to *help* people and provide a cheap alternative to oil, that is a big no-no.
This product, *if* it is safe enough and actually works as advertised, could have been sold to cities or even to governments(and not truck ramming terrorists) providing cheap energy alternative, but it is safe to bet that even so, the oil cartel would ensure by lobbying and controlling media, that it is never accepted by the public.
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:3, Interesting)
The coal burning plants are really bad, they cause tons of trouble downstream, but with the scrubbers in place at least the particulate pollution is a little better than it was in the past.
Due to the pressure of time nuclear power is probably the only viable short term solution, but the waste problem is still a very big issue, small scale nuclear power should definitely be off the table imho (see postings above), and we should spend massive funds on R&D to get us out of this dependency problem and move towards a truely sustainable future.
That may mean cutting down on energy consumption quite drastically, it's a fact that conservation is a lot cheaper and easier to achieve than generation. Heatpumps instead of natural gas burning for domestic heating would help a lot as well by the way.
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Actually, you are a wrong on a few things (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:3, Interesting)
9/11 was a big deal, because 20 guys made an opportunistic attack that leveled several city blocks of the most populous city in the US using nothing but box cutters. It was also the single largest attack aimed solely at American civilians ever to occur.
We knew that Al Qaeda existed, and that they hated our guts long before 9/11. In that regard, it wasn't a big deal at all. The fact that cockpit doors were kept unlocked is stupid, and we have only ourselves to blame for letting it happen.
After hiring a few locksmiths to fasten locks to the bloody doors, we should have stopped, and left it at that.
Instead, we had:
"Gee. These people really don't like us. Let's invade their country"
"Okay."
Re:Perfect thing to fit on a truck to ram somewher (Score:4, Interesting)
rtg article is interesting, but not a huge concern (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for posting the link about the Russian RTG's. After reading it, however, I'm not convinced that these portable nuclear reactors will be of such a great concern.
For starters, these generators are planned to provided electricity for population centers, not remote lighthouses and the such. So the likelyhood that they could be forgotten is unlikely since they'd provide power to tens of thousands of homes. Their absence would be noticed quickly. Also, since this is private enterprise, there's a commercial interest in keeping track of the generators. Even if the country using them or the producing company goes kaput, others will step in to recycle and re-use them.
The Russian RTG article linked above also included this tidbit-
It takes no less than 900 to 1000 years before RHSs reach a safe radioactivity level.
When I think of nuclear power, I remember stats about the waste requiring 10,000+ years before it decomposes to a safe level. Of course, I don't have any confidence about what humans will be doing in 10k years, so I wouldn't want to deposit that waste anywhere. But 1000 years? I can imagine there are places we could safely bury this waste and it won't come into human contact within 1000 years.
The Russian RTG example doesn't really provide stats on deaths associated with these miniature reactors. It doesn't take long, though, to find fatality stats regarding fossil-fuel energy production. In light of global warming, wars over petroleum, and rising fuel costs, I am eager to see nuclear adopted in the US.
Seth