Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

[ben_meyers]

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry
John Vidal and Nick Rosen guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 9 2008 00.01 GMT The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m <£13m> each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

Now that's thinking outside the box, distributed power, no huge grid to maintain. Not to mention that it is an American company using technology from Los Alamos for peaceful purposes.

[lapfog_1]

1. I'm guessing that you are volunteering your back yard?

Wonder how your neighbors feel...

[silverojo]

3. I know I don't want that shit in MY back yard

As windy as it is in this part of the prairie, I'll settle for wind power, thankyouverymuch.

[ben_meyers]

8. Damn right I would

They can bury it right next to the pool. I already live within a few miles of Palo Verde, the worlds largest and most efficient nuclear power plant. (BTW, Palo Verde is in the middle of the Sonora Desert giving lie to the anti-nuke people who worry about cooling water!)

I would rather that than thousands of square miles of windmills or solar panel farms and all the attendant power grid requirements.

[lapfog_1]

20. Why would a distributed set of nuke plants be

better than rooftop solar as far a grid requirements?

That's a silly thing to say.

Rooftop solar is not environmentally damaging if installed on already existent rooftops.

As for Palo Verde, it uses treated sewage water from Phoenix, which, in turn, gets it's water from the Salt River and from CAP. It is not a water free nuke. Not only that, but when thinking about the total energy output of Palo Verde, one must take into account the energy used to bring all that water to Phoenix. That the water is dual use doesn't preclude the requirement for the water to be present and the expense of bringing all of that water to Phoenix needs to be included in the total monetary cost and energy cost of running that facility.

Palo Verde also cost about $5.9 B to build. Kind of a high investment in a single, non distributed, power facility.

And, while the author of the article says that backyard nukes don't have "weapons grade" material in them, these facilities would be ripe for attack (or simple pilfering) by terrorists intent on creating a metro sized dirty bomb. Just bring the bomb material to the nuke plant, blow the hell out of it, and terrorize people within a 10 mile radius.

[OmahaBlueDog]

2. I remember this being discussed when I was a kid

Little, local neighborhood power plants. The vision then was that they'd look like houses -- not be buried.

[Subdivisions]

4. I can dig it. n/t

[curse of greyface]

5. I would be great for places such as large hospitals. NT

[RedCappedBandit]

6. We all know how safe and environmentally friendly nuclear power is

:eyes:

[StreetKnowledge]

10. Actually its very safe.

I don't know about these reactors, but newer types such as heavy water and pebble bed reactors are meltdown-proof. (Literally - it physically cannot happen.) The waste leftover is a problem, but would be smarter to reprocess waste for its usable elements. Spent uranium is radioactive for about 600 years - a long time, but a possible to contain one. The plutonium and such can be used for nuclear fuel. (Terrorism is not a concern - I'd love to see a terrorist hold it in his hand. He'd drop dead from radiation poisoning in hours.)

Burying them underground is also not a bad idea. Makes for easier containment if we have an accident. There has only been four major nuclear accidents in history - one Britain, two Russian and Three Mile Island - and of those, two were caused by forces not known at the time and the other two were operator screwups and inadequate safety procedures. (And not only that, the American and British accidents resulted in a total of seven - SEVEN - fatalities. Accidents at fossil fuel power plants probably kill that many in a month.) Nuclear power is much better understood now than it was even in 1986, and the days of things like cargo vessels being powered by reactors is coming. If this American company is one of many to build an industry around small-scale power station based not only on nuclear reactors but also wind turbines and hydroelectric systems, that could make a pile of money for the companies and America. Not to mention make the world a better place, and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

[Occulus]

12. "The waste leftover is a problem"

Maybe soon that won't be an issue.

[StreetKnowledge]

14. Better idea

I'm thinking that America (or some enterprising entrepreneur) might want to try making a machine that adds neutrons to nuclear waste. Bigger radioactive elements tend to break down faster - Iodine is one such example.

[kristopher]

17. And how much do you expect the reprocessing to add to the costs?

Not just the financial costs either (although that is extremely important). Reprocessing is a complex process requiring highly specialized and expensive infrastructure. If that were the solution pursued, it would require transporting the worlds spent fuel to one of 3 or 4 such facilities scattered around the world. Then, in addition to highly secure transport, you have to invest the energy to reprocess the fuel - if isn't an energy free process. By the time you are done, overall you will be lucky to get 5 units of energy back for each unit of energy invested.

Or we could pursue another path where 1 unit of energy earns between 20-40 units of return for solar, or 50-80 units of return for wind. Both those numbers are trending upwards BTW.

If you want something to get excited about, try this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x399989

[StreetKnowledge]

19. Reprocessing is expensive

But much less so than figuring out how to contain it for millenia. You do not earn energy, you have efficiencies of it. Solar and Wind energy is in many cases unreliable and cannot be relied upon, for all the obvious reasons - it doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't always blow. Here in Canada most wind turbines have gas turbine generators to make up for demand when the wind isn't blowing, which is completely against the point. The idea Gore put forth in your link is not a challenge - its a ludicrous pipe dream that would devastate the American economy with its costs. If America was to go with that idea, it would mean hundreds of new nuclear reactors and massive hydroelectric projects. Wind turbines and solar cells sound nice and work well, but only when they work, which is not all the time.

[kristopher]

22. You don't understand the proposal.

Nor do you understand the economics involved, but I'm not really surprised and I don't mean it as a slight. Usually the only people who do see the big picture are people who do intensive academic research into the available options. It isn't likely that someone who only follows the issue loosely or at a hobbyist level is going to appreciate either the complexity of what currently exists or the path that brings together a wide variety (much more than just wind and solar) of technologies to meet the needs of modern society with sustainable energy sources. But trust me, it can be done and it is the most cost effective answer to both energy security and climate change.

For example, you do in fact, "earn" energy in the sense that it requires energy to collect energy and put it to work. The greater the surplus in that process, the greater the surplus society has to do other things with. That equals long term wealth accumulation.

Your evaluation of renewables is one based on what you are familiar with - the current model of powering society is the only one possible to you because it is the only one you've known; that isn't the definitive answer, however. We developed an extremely inefficient system that wastes most of the input energy as lost heat because that was all we knew how to do at the time. You criticize solar and wind for their intermittent nature; but you might consider that the way we do things now have huge deficiencies that do not apply to renewables. A great deal of thought and research has gone into understanding the relationships between energy use in all sectors and using renewables to leave fossil fuels behind.

I'd suggest you carefully investigate the proposal that Gore is making. It is neither frivolous nor too costly for current economic circumstances. This is probably the most important policy issue facing the world and it deserves as much of your time as you can devote to researching the alternatives.

[lapfog_1]

21. You need to do more research

if you think TMI was the only US based nuke accident.

[MattBaggins]

27. Why are you claiming that Heavy Water reactors

are melt-down proof and literally can not happen physically? You need to go talk to the folks at Cherynobl. These reactors would in no way be heavy water reactors and would not be based around making weapons grade plutonium.

[Webster Green]

7. Mini plants using fuel-cell technology might be a better idea.

I'm no expert, but nukes give me the willies. :scared: :nuke:

[xochi]

9. Since the timeframe in question when dealing with radioactive waste

ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years, according to the National Research Council, just exactly where, I wonder, does this company, Hyperion, plan on storing the nuclear waste produced by the power plants it sells. Or, like most of its corporatist-minded colleagues such as Exxon, will it just not worry about it, as long as it can make humongous profits for its shareholders and CEOs and, like Exxon, simply use its high-powered lawyers to deflect and evade in the courts any punitive damages and clean-up costs?

[StreetKnowledge]

11. That is for unreprocessed waste.

Process and remove the usable elements and that timeline shrinks to 600-700 years. Plutonium lasts half a million years, but if the world runs out of uranium, then we can use the plutonium. Also, some types of nuclear reactors - Canada's CANDUs for example - can use waste from other reactors for fuel.

[ben_meyers]

13. Well, considering that the worlds 1st sustained nuclear reaction

was accomplish in the 1940's, making the whole industry about the same age as I am, I really think we might have a little more to learn about re-processing so-called "nuclear waste". Some day, no matter how deep we bury it, we will be digging up what was once considered waste and putting it to use.

Keep in mind that at one time gasoline was a waste by-product of the refining industry.

[StreetKnowledge]

18. I think that'll happen soon

The type of uranium used by conventional PWRs has only about 50-60 years supply left. Uranium supplies of the weaker type we have enough for centuries at least, and American PWRs cannot be converted unless you want to gut the core and replace it, which is an expense which is probably not justifiable.

[Dogmudgeon]

23. Where do we put CO2? Or cadmium from solar cells?

The units will be encased in concrete and buried. That's very safe compared to what we have now -- fossil fuel, burned and exhausted into the free air. And the NRC's safety criteria are ridiculous -- spent MOX (mixed oxide) nuclear fuel decays to background level in less than 1,000 years. That's still a long time, but it's quite reasonable for something sealed in a buried, hardened cask.

Spent MOX can even be burned in CANDU (Canadian Deuterium/Uranium) reactors. Most fourth-generation reactors are designed to burn this "waste", too.

As for corporate control, always a big concern of anti-nuclearists, check out who is leading the solar-wind-tidal pack: it's the largest corporations in the world, like GE, Monsanto, Siemens, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Abengoa. Nuclear or non-nuclear, the corporations will seize control of it if allowed.

It's not as simple as they make it out to be on TV or online. It never is, no matter what the technology is.

--p!

[cliffordu]

15. Uh.....Solar and wind.....NOW???

[The Shadow]

16. Hell, Put One In My Yard, Then Hire Me To Maintain It, Hehe!

I've been around reactors most of my adult life and I'm not afraid. I wonder how feasible they really would be?

[xochi]

24. Here's some information from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Despite claims from some who seem to be spokespersons for the nuclear industry, there appear to be many safety and environmental considerations yet to be addressed in a satisfactory manner regarding CANDU reactors, nuclear waste management and disposal, environmental impacts, performance issues, cost overruns, transport of radioactive materials, etc.

http://www.ccnr.org/

http://www.uraniumcitizensinquiry.com/submissions/submission08.doc

http://www.pembina.org/search/results?cx=003768367563011025923%3A0wbudncefli&cof=FORID%3A11&sa=Search&q=nuclear#947

[johnaries]

25. What nobody talks about regarding nuclear energy

is that uranium is a limited resource, and uranium mining is VERY dangerous and harmful to the environment!
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=GWYA,GWYA:2005-19,GWYA:en&q=mining+uranium+dangers

[JVS]

26. Awesome!