Mini Nuclear Power Plants For Your Neighborhood In Five Years
Scientists at the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb say nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power about 20,000 homes will be available within the next five years. The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, absent of any weapon-grade materials, and also have no moving parts.
Awesome. Call them Nükleer and we can sell them at Ikea!
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The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. ‘We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.’
The reactors must be refueled every seven to ten years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.
‘You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,’ said Deal. ‘You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it’s too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.’
Eh, I dunno…I wouldn’t want to be a beta tester, I’ll tell ya that.
Source: guardian.co.uk | Image: tico24 on Flickr under Creative Commons
Oh God, No! But… what a hilarious image: had to laugh!
nuclear energy is actually pretty clean
As some of you know, I have been begging for one of these in my garage! These will be safer then visiting a friend in the hospital. Talk about radiation! This would also combat centralization of electricity generation. I would be surprised if the government gets behind it just for that reason.
Quote”
$25m each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.” End Quote.
Is this technology to cost 25 million per unit?
lol, that’s 2,500$ per household in a community of 10,000. Cheaper to buy solar panels I think!
http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/Native/business_finance/pns_native_alaska_nukes.asp
Check this link and see this is nothing new.
It could be in service today but for the foot draging of our government. Other countries are using this today.
that better be 10cents per kilowatt, and even that is high.
so what happens when it wears out, ship it to China? I had to check this wasn’t from The Onion.
I can see the real estate ads already, look, your moths glow in the dark! As Ray said, anyone can set up their own x-ray machine…
A safer but more noisy alternative is the new over-unity magnetic generator. Runs with two diametrically opposed magnetic disks, it basically gets-off on the fact that it is running- and runs and runs.
It’s available in Australia. Energy captains have been trying to introduce “over-unity” sources since the fact we can split an atom for years. It’s just that we still have huge areas of superstition still left in our unevolved brains that shut-out very real solutions to energy crisis.
To put it in perspective, all the nuclear waste ever created in the US -all of it- would fit in a football field and stack 50′ high.
If you started stacking other waste types, like oil or coal, how many football fields do you think you would require?
At $250 or even $2500 per household would be a bargain, but the $25 million is really just the tip of the iceberg. They are radioactive which implies a certain level of risk from any number of scenarios, then there is the long term storage of the waste. Proponents love to dismiss all of these issues, but just one Timmy MvVey parking his Ryder truck next to one could require the permanent evacuation of a small city. There are 110,000,000 householding in the U.S., so that would imply 11,000 of these things spread all over the country. That implies security at 11,000 site, 11,000 refueling operations every 7 years, 11,000 units of nuclear waste every 7 years and so forth. Even so, perhaps we might need to go this route for the immediate future to give us a little breathing room, offsetting as much of those 11,000 units with reneable as humanly possible. Check out my web site for a means to pay for this since the plan described there might work well for this sort of nuclear, but not for the large-scale nuclear plants.
What about the cost of the fuel? With widespread adoption the fuel cost would skyrocket but advocates of nuclear power don’t like to include all the facts. Solar power is clean and safe and infinite so lets build more fossil fuel and nuclear plants!!! I forgot solar is not cost competitive. I guess we can’t do anything to reduce the cost so let’s give up and continue the same failed strategy!!