


Why purchase a generator for your compound when you could power your home or apartment building with a mini-nuclear reactor, built by a reliable, brand name company? Why indeed. Toshiba has designed what it calls a micro nuclear reactor. At 20 feet by 6 feet, it's 100 times smaller than your normal, power plant sized variety. According to Next Energy News, "The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat … The whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour."
Well, there you are. I'm sure nothing could ever go wrong with these, and nobody would ever try to sabotage them, creating bite-sized meltdowns.
The company plans to install the first mini-reactor in Japan next year. If all goes well and regulations will allow it, the reactors will be available in the United States in 2009.
By Andrew at 12:41 PM ON 12/19/07
I want one...but how much does it cost?
By BrokenBird at 1:08 PM ON 12/19/07
Now terrorists won't have to bring bombs with them, they'll just sabotage your backyard reactor... Not sure I like the idea of having radioactive material near my house.
By glowbunny at 1:16 PM ON 12/19/07
Yeah! This is a great DIY-Apocalypse kit.
By mik4384 at 7:12 PM ON 12/19/07
ya sure i'll get one if i want to be bold at very young age and a child with 5 eyes
By Bill at 9:57 PM ON 12/19/07
At 200 kW, nobody is going to put one of these in their house. A much more likely application is for small, isolated communities. Like the ones in Alaska that haul in diesel fuel all summer for their generators and then pray that it lasts through the winter. One or two of these would provide reliable power to a couple hundred homes for decades. If it's as safe as they claim, just bury it in reinforced concrete and let it go. Great idea.
By none at 12:29 AM ON 12/20/07
lol where does the waste go?
By MoidSki at 1:53 AM ON 12/20/07
They already have these bad boys on our submarines. They only need a water source for the reactor to build up steam and your set. And you wouldn't have any significant waste in it's 40 year life span. And the radioactive material wouldn't be enough to blow up and cause a problem on such a small scale. But we will never see it because the energy companies have their hands in the regulatory committee so we can't get cheap energy.
By crichtonx at 9:42 AM ON 12/20/07
What MOIDSKI said !!
By sknowlton at 10:57 AM ON 12/20/07
Can I get a car size one to save on gas?
By CanadianBrit at 12:07 PM ON 12/20/07
As for cost, if you take the 5cents per hour and work it back to 40 years, your looking at about $17000 for the unit
By CCNC at 12:25 PM ON 12/20/07
BrokenBird, you already have radioactive material near your house, and if you don't have any IN your house today, you did at one point.
By someasshole at 5:06 PM ON 12/20/07
the terrorists allready have nukes, its our goverment, watch 911 loose change on utube. but it would be nice to stop getting raped by the power company who is burning coal that is owned by the goverment who recieves a royality for the coal. so instead of building more hydro plants to provide cheap clean power, they claim there hurting the fish and want to tear them out so we have to burn more coal and the goverment machine recieves more royalities.
By formernuc at 10:15 AM ON 12/21/07
The material, Uranium 235, cannot 'blow up' since it is a thermal isotope and its volume would not be enough to make a significant dirty bomb.
CCNC is correct. Most homes have smoke detectors, which contain Americanium. And homes made of brick or located near clay deposits also provide radioactive exposure.
By mathmajor at 12:38 PM ON 12/21/07
Canadianbrit is a bit off on the price.
Five cents/per KwHour times 200 Kilowatts times 350,400 hours in 40 years is a bit over $3.5 million dollars.
That said, it's only $87,600 per year plus interest on the $3.5 mil mortgage. This would be affordable, even cheap, for a small community, as Bill suggests.
Also, disconnecting from the local electric utility would certainly give everyone in the community a warm and fuzzy feeling... And if we could ever get the state PUC to require utilities to purchase power from independent providers without limit, even a community of 10-20 families could go in for one of these babies and make money at it. How would you like to be part of a small co-op that gave you free electricity and also a check each month?
By emockler at 11:15 PM ON 12/21/07
What about when they come up with something even better and your stuck with this thing for 40 years?
By Nightman at 1:42 PM ON 12/22/07
Unsure of the details, but if it can service more than a single dwelling, just imagine the additional hot water that would be able to serve multiple homes/apartments, community centers, etc. Not to mention it would be an additional power source for future electronic vehicles. Amortizing the cost wouldn't seem to be a problem. But the other posts are correct in that the public utilities would have a different view of the new competition!
By ddd at 9:46 AM ON 12/23/07
우아아앙
By collective82 at 7:50 AM ON 12/24/07
LOL you guys are all worried about the terrorists? shoot im worried bout the japanese returning the nuclear favor a hundred fold over!
By John Matrix at 12:27 PM ON 12/27/07
The power companies are required in most states to purchase any excess electrical power you generate.
200KW is a maximum output, but I am sure you can use control rods to scale output out. But wouldn't it be nice to get a check from the power companies, instead of sending them one!
This small reactor could help ease the strain on the antiquated power grid, and would go a long way to eliminating mass power outages like produced by Snow/Ice storms, Hurricanes, and other such natural disasters. It would also facilitate the use of electric cars and such or even hydrogen generation stations that use electrolysis to create hydrogen from water.
If it is relatively safe, it could really take a huge bite out of crude imports and take the funds away from tyrants like Chavez of South American neighbor, or the Middle East terrorist supporters!
$25,000 would be a bargain for such a device, and well within most home owner's price range, $35K or more and it starts getting out of most price range.
By John Matrix at 5:52 PM ON 12/27/07
Nightman, haven't you heard about Al Gore's energy bills for a single month, I dare say he might have to have 2 of these reactors put in.
As for the concerns about radiation, well it appears to be installed below ground, and with concrete walls and such, you will probably get more radiation from the radon coming up through the ground under your house than from this thing, but have no fear, I am sure the OSHA and EPA will be all over this thing, before they allow it to be install at the first home.
If it pass the safety test, can you imagine Hospitals, nursing homes, cell / telephone services, financial institutions, and other businesses going off the grid, and becoming energy self-sufficient. Again, if this is safe technology, unless it is prohibitively expensive, it will be wonderful! As for being stuck with it for 40 years if something else better comes along, well that is part of the risk you take any time you adopt a new technology. Unless you can pull out a crystal ball and foresee when that "Better technology" will come along, you'll just have to make your best guess and weigh the cost of purchase and installation, against the benefits of cheap and clean energy. Unless someone comes out with 95% or better efficient solar panels that can produce electricity at $0.04 or less per KW, and the production of which doesn't produce some ultra-toxic waste (see the nickel cad plant that makes the batteries for all those new hybrid cars!), so the mythical cold fusion is harnessed, I just don't see anything coming down the road over the next 10 years, that can give the same independence that this Toshiba Reactor can give... if it passes inspection!
By buckminster at 3:59 PM ON 01/03/08
Oh man, I am gonna go out buy one of those cold war surplus Titan II underground missle launch complex and power it with one of these Toshiba nukes. With a 200 ton steel and concrete blast door nobody is gonna annoy me again.
By HPtech at 7:18 PM ON 01/24/08
Hey the underground missle home thing has already been done! LOL your a little late.
As for the Nuke I am all for it. I don't think the safety issue will be anything really. Remember we nuked them. They have nuke plants with excellent safety records. Compare them to all the worlds nuke plants safety records, they are at or near the top. With a 3-4 Kw grid attached home solar array running a avg. $16-18k if you add solar hot water that brings it up to around $38K. $4-5 Kwh is not a bargin yet. Large business would snap them up talk about cheap power! Imagine UPS, FedX, GM, ect... running on 4-5 of these units! They would pay for themselves in 2-3yrs plus think of all the CO2 that would be saved.
All communities would benifit from this technology.
By VehiclePower at 5:18 PM ON 04/15/08
Step aside Hybrids. Reduce the size of this further, and we might be able to eliminate the need to stop for fuel for our full size vehicles ever again.
By J5 at 3:18 PM ON 04/28/08
This is a cool idea, but needs to be at 2.5% the size and capacity to run a single average McMansion. These were actually proposed back in the 50's and even FROD (I mean FRAUD) came out with a two seater pickup truck the was to be nuclear powered (the whole bed was enclosed and housed the reactor so useless as a truck) ... oh and the geniuses worried about terrorizers blowing up your back yard.... just repeat after me in a mantra like fashion till you manage to hypnotize yourself "There are no terrorists, there never were, There are no terrorists, there never were, There are no terrorists, there never were, ....")
By Aquila at 6:11 PM ON 06/12/08
Let's all go nuclear. This is exactly what the world needs to avoid perishing under the awful greenhouse effect.
By Asakari at 3:00 PM ON 06/30/08
The coolant water exhausted from a nuclear power plant has less radioactive particles than your beer.
Stop with this overreaction and bias of problems with nuclear waste. The reason we have an energy crisis is because of liberals exaggerating everything, not to mention the waste problem isn't really a problem anymore because we can utilize it as MOX fuel.
The very few accidents of nuclear energy are always exaggerated compared to the many coal, and oil accidents. We handle the waste with the greatest of care and people still blabber on about things that "might happen".
By precisecalcouk at 5:28 PM ON 07/24/08
Exelent Idea. The UK realy needs a good supply of cheep energy as we eat it especialy during the winter, but as the average UK taxpayer relises by now paying over £1.32 per galon 07/08, that cheep energy will have to be taxed per kW hour. The goverment will kill it with legislation and tax before the idea was even had left the house of commons. Just think about each comunity creating a co-op using free energy at night and selling it to industry during the day.
By Patrick Van Esch at 3:26 AM ON 08/11/08
Unfortunately, this is a hoax. It is derived from the Galena, or the Toshiba 4S reactor, which is indeed a small reactor designed (but never built) for a remote village in Alaska, but still 10 MW. See http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nucenviss2.html
No "personal nuke". Just a "small town nuke".
Sorry.
By Pasticca at 9:14 AM ON 11/13/08
The article that I was sent said that each reactor services 10,000 homes and it would cost approximately $2,500 per year for each home to use the power or 5 center per kilowatt. But it could be fictional.
By Pasticca at 9:15 AM ON 11/13/08
The article that I was sent said that each reactor services 10,000 homes and it would cost approximately $2,500 per year for each home to use the power or 5 cents per kilowatt. But it could be fictional.
By LSBeene at 6:51 PM ON 11/13/08
Ok, the idea of having one per apartment building IS idiotic ... but it doesn't preclude the idea of having 20 of them clustered in a safe compound.
or 100 of them, in the same space as a current nuclear plant.
It's feasible.
By shakespare at 3:07 AM ON 01/02/09
i think this is realy fantastic. it kinda looks too good to be true. are the schematic diagrams for it available? i might just be able to build myself one at a cheaper rate, then, maybe sell it in my community.
By TestKing at 1:01 AM ON 02/03/09
i think this is realy fantastic. but somehow Now terrorists won't have to bring bombs with them as you have every thing to blast your home at your backyard.
By MEW MEW at 1:56 PM ON 02/08/09
RUN! its gonna blow! (mini-nuke goes off) nope its good but dangerous
By Gary Winnick at 5:44 AM ON 03/09/09
really nice idea. Thanks
By Kitchen Resources at 1:59 AM ON 03/12/09
great product for producing power.
By flower at 3:01 PM ON 03/30/09
thats a cool idea indeed
By Extenze at 2:52 AM ON 04/07/09
Thanks for good information
By shredd important papers at 12:03 AM ON 04/25/09
It 's really nice idea to power up home with reactor, I will get information about its cost after my
shredd important papers work.
By blogtwit at 4:32 AM ON 05/10/09
what would be social impact if everyone has one mini reactor in his basement.
By Husky at 11:57 PM ON 06/02/09
You guys DO understand that the radioactive materials used in these and, for that matter, full scale reactors, are of next to no use in nuclear or thermonuclear weapons, right?
The small amounts of nuclear fuel in these and 'big' reactors aren't enough to release the huge amounts of energy we see associated with nuclear weapons. To put it simply, if terrorists wanted to use these to make even a weak nuclear weapon, the kind that would probably have trouble leveling a small town, they would have to gather many of them together, take them apart, remove the fuel, separate it, enrich it, THEN begin the complex task of forming it into a weapon core, which involves a good deal of complex machining, far beyond the capabilities of any small group in the field... From there, the rest of the bomb would have to be built around it, again, no small task.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
Give that a read.
Anyways, about the best possible result(for terrorists), or worst(for us), is that they could find several of them clustered together, and plant a decently sized traditional bomb in the vicinity, thus creating an impromptu 'dirty nuke', which would mainly just spread a small amount of radiation over a similarly small area.
As far as dangers from normal operation... Nuclear power generation is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, if you think that simply because these are small, they would be exempt, I think you're rather foolish...
By Ex-Nuke at 8:38 AM ON 08/04/09
As a EX Nuclear Tech from the Navy, and an Electrician.. you guys are too funny!... I would get one in a heart beat.... and 200 Kw is not very much power.... I have been tempted to Upgrade my Power feed from a 200 Amp Curcuit to a 400 Amp one... since I have Popped my Mains before with the Power Draw of running my Commpresser when workikng on my Cars before... remember WATTS are AMP x Volts... so to Pop a 200 Amp Breaker (240 Volts) you are pulling 48,000 Watts... that's 48Kw... or one quarter of the MAx output of this reactor.... so no, it would not power a hundred houses... 100 Houses could only get about 8 amps before it would over load... and a 1800 Watt hair dryer Pulls 15 Amps at 120 Volts, so they would not even be able to dry thier hair with a dryer... *Laugh* and a 48Kw Natural Gas Generator runs a little over $13,000 and you have to pay for the Gas to run it over the live of the generator.... I'd take a Nuke in a heartbeat!
By Mukesh at 11:18 PM ON 08/15/09
i want one but how much cost of it i am from India
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