Portable Backyard Nuclear Reactors Ready to be Installed by 2013
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 09.25.08
image: Hyperion Power
Back in August the news broke that Hyperion Power Generation had found someone to buy the first of its portable nuclear power units. While I’m sure many doubts about this technology remain in people’s minds, a recent interview with Hyperion CEO John Deal sheds some more light on the whole notion of portable nuclear power. Here are some highlights from Techrockies:
You Can’t Turn Our Fuel Into a Bomb
On safety:
The way that you sustain a chain reaction for nuclear energy is through the use of a moderator. This is Nuclear Energy 101. A moderator is a necessary part of almost all power-producing reactors. What it does is slow down the neutrons so that those neutrons that are being shed by the uranium, as it breaks apart, can be grabbed by other uranium atoms. That fracturing process is called fission, and that's how you get heat.In traditional reactors, you've got to have a moderator and then you've also got to have some way to cool it so it doesn't get out of hand. In our nation's light water reactors, the water serves as both the moderator and the coolant. So the moderator actually makes it go and a cooling system keeps it from going too far.
Our fuel is very unique. It's uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238. By comparison, bomb-grade fuel is about 98 percent enriched.
You can't turn our fuel into a bomb. You'd have to re-enrich, re-process the fuel, so you might as well start with yellowcake. That's one of the neat safety features of our reactor. For nefarious purposes, our reactor has absolutely no value whatsoever.
Waste After 10 Years the Size of a Football
On how to dispose of fuel:
We're going to take it back to the factory and we're going to reuse most of it.The waste that comes out of our reactor after powering 20,000 homes for 8-10 years is about the size of a football. Using coal and gas over the same time frame, the waste stream for just you, after factoring in CO2 emissions, would overflow Mile High Stadium in Denver. So our waste stream is very concentrated, and yes, we have to do something with it, but there are known ways of dealing with it.
The U.S. has a different political philosophy, but from a technical standpoint, dealing with waste is really not complicated. It's a regulatory complication, it's a political complication, it's a social complication. We have enough uranium to power the planet for the next thousand years, but the problem again is the waste, so you want to handle that waste in a smart manner and not just put it in a pond somewhere.
Depending on where the waste originates will determine how we dispose of that waste because there are different regulations depending on where you are in the world. We know how to deal with it. For security reasons, we're not disclosing what will happen to it, but it's not going to just sit in some bucket somewhere. Recycling was "baked in" to our reactor design from the beginning.
When Will This Be Ready?
6/13 is the number that sits above my desk. We ship in June of 2013, our first customer install. We will make that date.We have an engineering plan that goes out in a couple of years, but we built in a robust contingency. Even though we have a very well thought out engineering plan, we have already put in twice as much calendar time as we need to go to market because you just don't know. There could be regulatory issues, supplier issues ….
Again, we're not trying to rush. We're not competing against some release by Microsoft or something Exxon is coming out with. We're alone in the market space with this.
Nuclear energy is very traditional, it's very well known. Word about this kind of reactor—a uranium hydride reactor from Los Alamos—it was first talked about 20 years ago. This is not a new product; this is a new product coming out to the market.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the full interview at :: Techrockies.
More info at :: Hyperion Power Generation
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Cool! sign me up! assuming of course I won't have wind turbines or Solar panels in my backyard by then.
Sounds expensive. Also, is there any threat of meltdown? And if there is, wouldn't that threat increase as more and more people pick these things up? Seems like burying these things in the ground poses somewhat of a risk to major groundwater contamination.
Even if there's 0 risk of failure, there has to be some risk of someone digging and somehow cracking the reactor. As I said, the more of these that are out there, the chances of something going wrong increases.
I've researched a lot into this company and other smaller reactor companies. Although the public is viewing this as a "backyard" solution, these companies are working with governments and big industry. Makes way more sense (both financially and for safety) than to sell to a guy who can't even keep his lawn sprinklers working.
Mr. Jones: "What, you don't have your own portable nuclear power generator?"
How the hell do you one-up that? Do you know how hard it is to find a DeLorean?
"You can't turn our fuel into a bomb. You'd have to re-enrich, re-process the fuel, so you might as well start with yellowcake. That's one of the neat safety features of our reactor."
This is a good point, but that last sentence is a marketing ploy. Every nuclear power reactor, large or small, uses fuel that would need to be enriched quite a bit in order to be used as a weapon. This one is nothing special in that regard. The only reactors I'm aware of that generate power from weapons-grade or near-weapons-grade uranium are those in US naval ships and submarines, because that allows the reactors to be lighter and more compact, which matters at sea.
Plus, I think TH does this product a disservice by calling it a "backyard" reactor. Personally, I'd love my own personal nuclear reactor- I'd make a fortune selling power back to my power company, for one. I'll take a big commercial reactor in the neighborhood too, and if the geology is right they can store the waste there for all I care, though I hope they'll reprocess and reuse it a few times first (i.e. I hope pigs fly and the US updates its policy on nuclear waste). However, anyone who thinks carefully about it can realize that a backyard is no place for a reactor, for the security reasons listed in comments above. These reactors would be great on ships at sea (no diesel!), on military bases or for large factories, in hospitals (which currently must maintain backup generators in case of power failure), and so on, but not for individuals.
Now if Hyperion had called it a backyard reactor, I'd have a serious quarrel with their marketing scheme, and I'd bet regulators would have had quite a bit to say about it, too. If it is just Treehugger's slogan, I suggest you make sure to correct the impression it gives of playing fast and loose with reactors, dotting them willy-nilly all over the map without regard for safety and security.
2013 and not a minute to soon. Pretty soon I am going to be labeled as working for the nuclear industry withing about 2 hours of posting this. Mark my words.
I concur with the above comments on how deceptive it is to call this a 'backyard reactor'.
It is a municipal and/or mega-industrial size reactor good for 20,000 homes. It is not for any one person's backyard.
Some small research reactors use HEU, but the quantities are very small, and there are proposals for that to change. See http://www.rertr.anl.gov/RERTR28/Abstracts/S9-4_Dunavant.html
There shouldn't be a threat of meltdown if they use a miniature pebble bed reactor. If you don't know what that is, definatly worth looking up.
Given that the company probably knows of the public's fear of radiation, I believe that they will make it darn near impossible to accidently or even on purpose(amateur) to open the reactor up.
"We have enough uranium to power the planet for the next thousand years"
Actually, if all coal fired power plants currently operating were converted to Uranium reactors, we would run out of Uranium in about 30-40 years time. That statement only makes sense if we do not increase the number of reactors in the world, which is not what this article is suggesting.
"You can't turn our fuel into a bomb."
What a crock. Dirty bombs could easily take advantage of these backyard reactors. Just add one of these 'footballs' to the normal arsenal of ballbearings and scrap metal in a regular car bomb and hey presto! An uninhabitable city.
This is an interesting concept. It makes me wonder if in the foreseeable future if there could be reactors spread out throughout an urban area. In many ways this could result in extremely brisk competition among decentralized utilities. Hopefully the economics work on this.
I've never heard a more ridiculous thing in my life.
God help us! Please keep your nuclear filth in the US, where only _your_ ground water will be contaminated for 25 centuries.
What would the method of groundwater contamination be with this reactor? If you can't say then you have no reason to speak.
"Actually, if all coal fired power plants currently operating were converted to Uranium reactors, we would run out of Uranium in about 30-40 years time. That statement only makes sense if we do not increase the number of reactors in the world, which is not what this article is suggesting"
Uranium is about as abundant on earth as is silver. Of course, U-235 is only a fraction of that total, but with a) fuel reprocessing, which reduces demand for new uranium by 30%, and b) fast breeder reactors, in which virtually all the uranium is usable, not just U-235, which would increase the effective fuel supply about 150-fold, there is no problem. This should take care of your 30-40 year time frame. Whether or not nuclear power remains economically viable if we do this remains to be seen.
In other words, there IS a lot of nuclear fuel available, but only if we use it wisely. And thus far, we haven't. At least the US hasn't, with its absurd policy of not recycling so-called "spent" fuel. The first country that move to fast breeder reactors and shows they are economically viable will dramatically reduce its need for nuclear fuel, and I'll bet the rest of the nuclear world would follow suit if only to improve the image of nuclear power.
Did I mention that this would reduce nuclear waste by 99% and that the waste that remains would be much shorter lived?