The Russians are not alone in pushing the idea that the next generation of nuclear reactors should have more in common with the small power plants on submarines than the sprawling installations of today.
And this in particular:
The promise of miniature reactors powering homes, offices and schools is still years from being realized. The first Russian design, a pontoon-mounted reactor intended to be floated into harbors in energy-hungry developing countries, is already being built. But most promoters expect small reactors to come online at the end of this decade.
And this:
Some models are tiny. One, for example, would be small enough to fit into a shipping container and would be trucked from site to site, like a diesel generator, except that it would need to be refueled only once every seven years or so.
The opening cost for these "mini-reactors" is expected to run about $100 million. The full story is here.
worrying about nuclear proliferation at 4am in the morning is the mark of a true humanist.
if these were buried and tagged i don’t think its that significant a problem.
Oh kay. It’s 2010, the TWENTY FIRST century, and the Russians are developing and selling smallish nuclear reactors around the world. How TWENTIETH century! How primitive and benighted and ecologically unsound!
They should concentrate on burning coal for their future energy needs, like us!
Market economics : not matter how much fulfilling my dreams will cost you I want it all, I want it now, and there will always be someone to give it to me for a budget.
the Russian company, Akme Engineering [..]
What could possibly go wrong?
Never heard of it before, despite i am russian. And there are not so much to worry about: AFAIK reactor material also need to be enriched and it make little difference what to start from as long as you have appropriate technology.
I wouldn’t be happy with this particular miniature reactor technology either.
But there are others. Thorium cycle for example.
Have a look at the design from Hyperion Research. They sell small, 70 MW reactor (enough to power about 20,000 homes). The reactor is completely sealed, and buried in the ground. The only thing above ground are the turbines and pipes that take the heat from the reactor and convert it to power. There’s no maintenance, no risk of a meltdown or leak, and no waste disposal problem – every 7-10 years, the reactor is dug up, loaded on a truck, and shipped back to the manufacturer. A new module is put in the hole, which is filled up again and you get another 7-10 years of relatively cheap, stable power for an entire town. Everything, including the waste, goes back to the factory for recycling.
The only way a terrorist is getting his hands on one of those is to kill power to a community, then bring in heavy excavating equipment for a few days, and a crane and flatbed truck to move it. That’s simply not going to happen.
Reactors like this are a godsend for remote communities or developing countries, allowing them to skip the long, expensive process of building an electrical grid before they can get power to their people. These reactors have the potential to be paradigm-shifting enablers of growth for the third world.
They may also be a good solution for a mixed-mode power system that uses wind and solar when possible, but which also uses these small, safe reactors as supplemental base-load power when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t out or to help balance the load when demand shifts.
“The opening cost for these “mini-reactors” is expected to run about $100 million.”
Oh, I’m sure that as production ramps up, and economies of scale kick in, the price will come down to the point where every middle class family can afford one.
@Dan, there’s still a waste problem, it’s just that the manufacturer vice the end user has it.
Nuclear reactor power plans have been utilized by submarines for a long time. I know there are risk BUT sometime you must take chances. It sounds appealing a small truck pulls up and powers a town, but it does not need to refuel for seven years. Sounds too good to be true. I don’t think America has the best method of producing power. The main source is coal, this just sounds nasty. Russia is just trying to use today’s technology to increase the production possibility curve of the power market. I dont see why this is bad. If nuclear reactors are safe and can produce more energy per dollar, what is wrong with that?
Nuclear tips from the Russian Navy?
What I surprised Mr. Hendrick didn’t mention is that smallish ‘portable’ nuclear reactors were one of the very first things tried by the United States Military (and likely other countries as well).
The safety concern with small reactors is that you have a much smaller shutdown negative reactivity (that is a smaller margin to criticality) which make reactivity addition accidents much more severe if they do occur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1
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