Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

[pkpatriotic]

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry
John Vidal and Nick Rosen
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 $2,500 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

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 first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 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.'

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

 

[Argus Panoptes]

Are Mini-Reactors The Future Of Nuclear Power? : NPR

Are Mini-Reactors The Future Of Nuclear Power?
by BEN BRADFORD
February 04, 2013 3:33 AM

The U.S. government is investing millions of dollars in what it considers a promising new industry for American manufacturing: nuclear reactors. The plan is to build hundreds of mini-reactors, *** them around the U.S. and export them overseas.

Development of these reactors are already in the works, and at one office park in Lynchburg, Va., where one of these reactors is being assembled, the traditional signs of nuclear reactors are nowhere to be found. There are no cooling towers that look like smoke stacks, no clouds of steam over the buildings — just a research building and a tower about nine stories tall.

Inside, the plant's manager, Doug Lee, leads the way down through secure doors. It feels like the inside of a refrigerator but noisier. Spinning fans and water pumps drown out the sounds of hissing steam. At the reactor core, Lee stops.

"I can't let you in here," Lee says. "But this is the base of the tower, and this is the lower portion of the large tower you saw when you came in. This is our simulated reactor vessel."

It's simulated because the design still needs Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval.

"This is analogous to the core in a nuclear plant where the fission reaction takes place," Lee says.

The entire reactor — the core, the cooling system, everything — is self-contained in this rocket-shaped steel cylinder. The industry says that makes it safer. And the reactors will be small enough to build in a factory and ship on trucks, like prefabricated houses. They'll generate about one-tenth the power of a typical nuclear power plant.

Assistant Energy Secretary Pete Lyons sees promise that goes beyond a new energy gadget. He sees jobs.

"One of the features of these small reactors is that they can be entirely manufactured here in the United States," Lyons said. "They can literally be made in the USA. With the large plants, that's simply physically impossible."

Lyons pictures churning reactors out in factories, shipping them to utilities to replace aging coal plants or selling them to developing countries — which can't afford a full-scale $15 billion nuclear plant.

"We are trying to jump-start a new U.S. industry," he says. "That's my goal: a U.S. industry, U.S. jobs, clean energy."

In November, the Energy Department invested in Babcock & Wilcox mPower, the nuclear company that built the prototype in Virginia. In total, the government plans to invest more than $400 million. Industry officials like B&W mPower President Chris Mowry say the launch funding is to get off the ground, but ultimately the reactors need to be mass-produced.

"MPower is not going to be measured in terms of success in terms of building tens of these things, but in terms of hundreds of these things," Mowry says. "We're not trying to build a Rolls Royce; we're trying to build a Ford."

That model worries Ed Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"My feeling is that if you're going to have a nuclear power plant, it'd better be a Rolls Royce," he says. Lyman says small reactors carry a host of safety, security, environmental and economic concerns.

"Nuclear power is a technology which is much more suited for large plants, centralized and isolated from populated areas in as small a number of places as possible," Lyman says.

He says every nuclear power plant is a target for terrorism or is at risk during a disaster. Lyman says the closer the reactors are to populated areas, the more of a threat they potentially become. That's one reason Lyman is not convinced enough demand exists for mass production. He also worries about selling them overseas.

"It's a developing country that doesn't have a substantial electrical grid that is precisely the kind of country I would not want to see have any kind of nuclear power plant," he says.

But the industry counters that these reactors are so small and self-contained, they are almost "plug and play." Smaller, cheaper, with less staff — it's your entry-level nuclear reactor, perhaps coming online in about a decade.

 

[Argus Panoptes]

..................

The entire reactor — the core, the cooling system, everything — is self-contained in this rocket-shaped steel cylinder. The industry says that makes it safer. And the reactors will be small enough to build in a factory and ship on trucks, like prefabricated houses. They'll generate about one-tenth the power of a typical nuclear power plant.........................

Developing and deploying such technology should be a priority for Pakistan for many reasons.

 

[SURYA-1]

Considering 5 Kw for single home a nuclear power plant powering nuclear subs are are all ready capable of powering 20,000 homes.
Every country having nuclear know-how should work on this for civilian use.It's not very difficult.

 

[Hyperion]

The have licensed the technology to me...

Ooooooo... all the moolah I'm gonna generate with this...
@arp2041

 

[somebozo]

They are not the only one, Russians were the first to put mini nuclear reactors in light houses in remotest parts of Russia.

Also @Hyperion now called Gen4 Energy is not the only one to be building this concept.

Gen4 Energy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Toshiba 4S - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.
But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.
So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.


Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.

More on: Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses | English Russia

 

[tanzeel736]

Developing and deploying such technology should be a priority for Pakistan for many reasons.

They've offered it to Pakistan to power some facility the army is building. I recall seeing the tender documents a couple months back(family member involved in contract negotiations).

 

[Argus Panoptes]

They've offered it to Pakistan to power some facility the army is building. I recall seeing the tender documents a couple months back(family member involved in contract negotiations).

Can you share any more details, if possible?

 

[ChennaiSKing]

Concept is very good, but if some thing goes wrong then the after effect Nuclear consequence will be huge...

Rather they invest huge sum on researching in Mini Nuclear Technology, they can invest this money to make the solar cells cheaper and also the low cost wind farm machinery - these are more eco friendly and no dangerous consequence like the one we may face in Nuclear reactors...

By the way I found this Bloom Box to be more relevant and cool technology, hope they make it feasible for all....

 

[mehboobkz]

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.

Dude the article is of 2008, and we are finished with these five years. Its 2013.

So far Nothing, nada, Zilch, Ingenting, Icke, nashi, ekkert, wala lang, niets, niente, ei mittan, rien, netchego, ti pota.

Now close the thead pls!

 

[tanzeel736]

Can you share any more details, if possible?

What kind of details?

 

[474474]

What kind of details?

This is a public forum, there's no need to release internal details unless through the proper procedure

 

[tanzeel736]

This is a public forum, there's no need to release internal details unless through the proper procedure

Don't really have any sensitive information anyway. Just took a cursory look at the paperwork a few months back as a favor to a family member.

 

[474474]

Don't really have any sensitive information anyway. Just took a cursory look at the paperwork a few months back as a favor to a family member.

False hope