Hyperion Power Generation Sells Someone on Portable Nuclear Power

I think it's great. I'd rather see that coal plants. Probably actually safer, whatever the layman thinks.

This seems like a great idea. I know most people hate nuclear but I'm sure we can find uses for the waste

At first I thought this device was intended for personal use. That would be crazy, and I'm usually a supporter of nuclear power.

I don't know how I feel about using this in trucks, and I thought most trains got their electricity from the grid (making an onboard power source unnecessary). But for ships, I think nuclear would be far superior to diesel. However much of a comeback sailing makes, ships are going to need a reliable power source. Battery technology just isn't there yet for ships in terms of recharge time and energy per weight. Since the amount of solar power landing on a ship isn't enough to propel it, that means either a chemical or nuclear fuel. The US Navy's fleet of reactors has an impeccable safety record, as do the small number of civilian nuclear ships that have been built. Now that oil is expensive, building nuclear vessels is beginning to make economic as well as strategic sense.

*yawn*

Nuclear, finite resource, same story as oil, history repeats itself. Pointless.

Show me. DB

They claim that it could power 25,000 homes for 5 years. So at $25 million each, the "fuel" cost per household would be about $17. Of course there are maintenance, distribution, generation losses, etc...

If it weren't for NIMBY and NIABY, it seems like it would be economical.

Full disclosure, I think nukes would make sense as a base load after hydro and geothermal sources have been tapped b/c the sun shines when you need a/c and the wind blows when you need heat.

there are lots of issues but a "distributed" nuke power grid would have two huge advantages.

First.. no one is going to crash an airliner into one and even if they did - the impacts would be much smaller than the 50-100 mile radius of a big nuke getting toasted.

second.. how much power is lost from having to distribute the power from a nuke site - 50 -100 miles or more from where it is used?

I would like to know how much power they generate - how many would be needed per town or city...

The Hyperion reactor and others like it are exactly what is necessary to overcome the economic troubles with massively centralized plants; standardized designs and (relatively) mass production. Mitsubishi has a similar reactor design.

I don't think these designs are meant to be used to power trains, trucks or ships. They can simply be transported as a single unit instead of in pieces requiring assembly. When the unit has exhausted its fuel the whole thing can be removed and replaced.

@Bram: Reprocess the spent fuel and you've got centuries worth; begin using thorium and you've got thousands of years' worth.

Los Alamos Study Group is a hack organization based out of Albuquerque, with little or no direct nuclear qualifications and no relation with the lab. They use Los Alamos in their name to try and gain credibility.

It's just radiation ...

It will be interesting to follow this concept through the liscensing process. The NRC discouraged AECL from applying for a US liscense for its advanced CANDU reactor by saying that it would take a long time to liscense because it was so different. The CANDU is almost a clone of a PWR compared to this puppy.

I doubt the NRC will like the hands off approach. They will probably want this thing manned and protected at the same level as a full size reactor. This would be cost prohibitive on a reactor of this size.

Reactors of this size may not be economic but they are technically practical. The research station in Antarctica had one of about this size for many years. It was a more conventional PWR type reactor. This is also probably about the same size as the reactor in the NR-1 submarine.

Matt:
Other than the possible adverse economics because of its size, what do you object to in this concept?

Bill

I'm highly dubious about the "safety" claims. I'd like to see these reactors vetted by a neutral third party.

Also, peak output is five years? Typically nuclear plants change their fuel out every two or three years, so it's not out of the realm of possibility, but seems on the high side.

Also, what happens to the while unit after the fuel is depleted? Are the casings recycled or reused?

And those "can power 25,000 homes" numbers are misleading. Americans average 1200w, but peak usage is over 3000w. So, you'd have to supply enough to cover the peak usage, which would only be 9000 homes or so.

And that casing doesn't look very thick. How much radiation is leaking from these things?

portable eh?
1.5m is hardly what I would call portable

I wouldn't be to worried about this. Nuclear has such a bad name that most companies would be too alarmed about the PR repercussions of buying one of these units to actually utilize them. Small scale nuclear reactors only have a limited market to begin with--buying large amounts of power from the grid is cheaper and more reliable. If these things are going to be produced in any quantities, the units will probably wind up in government facilities (like military bases) and remote industrial sites.

Having the reactor as a discreet unit would actually be good for applications like military vessels. Don't forget, the subs, aircraft carriers and destroyers that protect us are nuclear powered. I'd feel better if the reactors used on those vessels were completely sealed from the manufacturing stage anyway.

And these reactors, or something on a similar scale, are going to be the main power source of any lunar and martian expeditions that we send out. Having the know-how to make these small reactors safe and easy to integrate into specialist systems is going to prove beneficial in the long run.

Hi all, first post so here goes...

We must move over to a redundant distributed and disaster resistant power supply system in order to safeguard our energy needs on a local basis.

Fusion is far from even it's initial stages whereas fission is proven and is being improved on. We cannot just sit back and rely on the current power generation system which generates and transports our power over many miles with great losses which in turn means that the large central power stations waste huge amounts of coal etc just to push power to us.

I believe that we will produce clean, safe and small solid state fission reactors which will be placed around each town and provide fission energy by the direct conversion of radiation to electrons without need for steam turbines etc.

For our childrens sake I hope that this view and technology will come to pass.

Regards

Reminds me of some of the technology from Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series. The residents of Foundation would sell these to worlds that had lost the technology to create nuclear power.

And that casing doesn't look very thick. How much radiation is leaking from these things?

Since it's buried in the ground, I imagine most of the radiation is going to be absorbed that way. But if the director of Los Alamos says it's loony, I'm willing to defer to his expertise.

Nuclear is a finite resoure -- we only have 1000+ years left of it IF we DONT start recycling the waste, which we are the only country in the world who doesn't.

JSDreyer,

People use the mean when calculating how many homes an electricity source will power because one generally has a large enough sample that there are not only many homes using more than the average, but also many homes using much less. The mean, or at least a mean calculated for a locality, is the correct value to use when making these sort of calculations.

Yes, nuclear resources are finite. But to dismiss nuclear power out of hand because we don't have infinite uranium reserves is foolish. When you account for fuel reprocessing and breeder reactor designs, then there is more than enough uranium to provide current power consumption for millennia, and thorium is several times more plentiful still.

That should be enough time for us to invent dirt-cheap solar power and large scale energy storage technologies, don't you think?

Isn't amazing how all the pro-nuke comments are always by Anomynous, that all these people don't even have the courage of their industry sponsored opinions? Hide in the shadows... "nuclear is good for you... huh huh huh..." Give it up, will you? It's such a sham. We've made such a mess of this planet with radioactive waste dump sites we're never going to get around cleaning them up... they are going to fester for hundreds of generations, if humanity makes it that far into the distant future, without mutating into ugly monsters. Enriching uranium for nuclear fuel is probably the worse idea inventors ever had... and now we're suffering for it, while these cloaked geeks hired by Entergy to blog all day trying to sell Treehugger readers on the idea nuclear is now OK. It's not, never has been, never will be. Thank heavens the anti-nuclear movement is finally waking back up from its complacency and lack of vigilance.

We have to STOP generating nuclear waste, period. And it's nuclear power spreading around the world that's spreading nuclear weapons. Stop nuclear everything. Go "carbon-free and nuclear-free." Read Arjun Makhijani's book of same name. The technology is here today to achieve carbon-free nuclear-free energy production in a couple of decades, sooner if we make the effort.

Mary Jane Williams

We have a severe waste problem because the US Congress won't let us deal with it responsibly. Current re-processing technology would reduce the volume of spent fuel waste by over 90%. France does it, Japan does it, why don't we? Answer: Because political powers here are allowed to tell lies about scientific issues. Does it seem reasonable to anyone that the "Green Left" does the same thing about nuclear that Bush has done with stem cell research? EPA reports? Evolution?

The Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory does NOT think Hyperion is a loony idea. That quote came from the director of the Los Alamos Study Group - a rich guy blogger that set up down there to blog away Neo-Con style against everything nuclear.

The knee-jerk, emotion driven, no-facts-allowed anti-nuke "lobbies" in the US have spent the last 30+ years dooming us into the coal and gas derived climate crisis we are only beginning to see today. Solar is great and wind is great and bio-fuels, hydro, tidal, etc are all great but they can't begin to replace the REQUIRED electricity in the US in our lifetimes.

Nuclear energy is the ONLY method we have to power the modern world without greenhouse gas emissions.

Forky

We have a severe waste problem because the US Congress won't let us deal with it responsibly. Current re-processing technology would reduce the volume of spent fuel waste by over 90%. France does it, Japan does it, why don't we? Answer: Because political powers here are allowed to tell lies about scientific issues. Does it seem reasonable to anyone that the "Green Left" does the same thing about nuclear that Bush has done with stem cell research? EPA reports? Evolution?

The Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory does NOT think Hyperion is a loony idea. That quote came from the director of the Los Alamos Study Group - a rich guy blogger that set up down there to blog away Neo-Con style against everything nuclear.

The knee-jerk, emotion driven, no-facts-allowed anti-nuke "lobbies" in the US have spent the last 30+ years dooming us into the coal and gas derived climate crisis we are only beginning to see today. Solar is great and wind is great and bio-fuels, hydro, tidal, etc are all great but they can't begin to replace the REQUIRED electricity in the US in our lifetimes.

Nuclear energy is the ONLY method we have to power the modern world without greenhouse gas emissions.

Forky

If this techonogy is actually feasble it could save the world. What would be the actual cost per household when all is added together.

Nuclear is the way of the future. Uranium Reactors are just the begining. Start researching Thorium Reactors and Graphite Reactors.

Check out the techonologies at Babcox and Wilcox Nuclear Technologies in VA. Westinghouse and General Electric also design and build. B&W is the largest designer and builder of Nuke Plants. Someone mentioned France as producing 80% of their electric from Nuke generation, just so happens that B&W ownes most of Framatone/Arvana corp. (The French Electric co's.) Happy researching.