Wow.... Math for the win... Either it serves 10,000 people or the price per house is $1250. Since I don't pay over $200 a month in electric, and don't know many people that pay that much. I am going to go with the serving of 20,000 people and the price per house is $1250. Of course I live in the mid-east so.... Now beyond that, I am guessing that there must be variables that aren't given. :|

The other thing is, 4,000 of these things buried around the nation... Wow... $100 Billion worth... That makes me throw-up a little in my mouth. :|

What people don't realize is that this is a potential 'key' to a hydrogen economy...

for a mere $1Bn(a pittance when we talk about a $700bn economic bailout and a $400Bn military budget) you can have 40 of these mini nukes doing nothing but using their electricity to break apart water into hydrogen and oxygen... granted there is the infrastructure that has to be built but with it being to small and modular, the source could be placed close to market while it's being fed via pipeline from the sea.

Wouldn't US$25M divided by 20,000 people come out to US$1,250 per person on the grid?

Either way, that's a solid deal. You could tack this on to the price of a house on the grid of one of these nukes without significantly affecting its baseline value, AND paying next to nothing for electricity would be a huge selling point.

So where do I sign?

Thanks for the heads-up, guys. I added that it was a 10,000-home community I was referring to. But think of this number as being spread out over the five-year life of this "nuclear battery," which might be even cheaper since its nuclear fuel must be changed every five years, rather than a full replacement.

If you factor in a household using a plug-in electric car and maybe electric heat rather than gas, that $2,500-worth of energy used in a year would be easy to do.

Some audiophile is going to buy one of these to plug his platinum power cable into. "Plutonium really enriches and warms the music"

You must have the highest quality electrons for proper fidelity, obviously.

I've been following these things for a while. Think it's freakin great. I mean, people are so afraid of nukes that there's little chance of adoption on the large scale. But if they can actually sell these things in the US then the nuclear movement could be started from the other end :D What I've gotta wonder is can you modulate power? For instance could some rich crazy guy buy one and put it under his mansion and just burn up the fuel as he needs it, or will he have to turn a nearby pond into a fish boil/ hyrdrogen factory to dump all of the excess?

This could do a good deal for the whole floating city concept :D Just build you a boat big enough to lug this around (and you'd probably have to sink it in a massive concrete block to make it legal) and turn all the excess power to seacrete creation.

Wonder how much the refuel costs, couple mil?

re:ReeyferMadness
Currently US nuclear reactors provide 20% of the US baseline power needs, baseline meaning its on all the time as opposed to peak power generators such as coal fire plants that can be turned on during times of peak usage. The reactors not like a car that you can just switch on and off when you need it, the power comes from the heat generated by the decay of the nuclear fuel rods, the reaction temp can be controlled by graphite control rods but either way the fuels going to be used up by either the accelerated decay from generating power or from its own natural decay cycle. i think that makes sense... anyway as far as fuel goes it depends on the design, if they can use already refined fuel from decommissioned nuclear warheads then it should be that expensive, just toss in some new fuel rods, do some PM then bury the sucker again. Even if they can't run on U238 the renewed interest in nuclear energy plus the large amount of existing infrastructure show make fuel somewhat easy to come by.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

wow!...suddenly wind and solar seems.....out-dated.

There are some very important drawbacks to this system at a glance. First, we already get much of our electrical energy from nuclear plants in the U.S. and we still have no where to dispose of the nuclear waste (the Yucca Mtn. site is already fully reserved in terms of space). The amount may of waste may be less for this system, but not trivial. Secondly, these systems would have to compete with major energy companies that dominate most cities (Excel, etc.) It does have potential however, that is if everyone is willing to live next to a radioactive power source. You might say 'sure' now but if someone built this in your neighborhood, you might have second thoughts. Nonetheless, if this company is already producing them, it must be economically viable...and relatively safe? We'll have to see.

An that pesky waste will take care of itself or is the long term storage included in the calculation of the price?

Yeah sure ... "clean energy". bloody hypocrats.
And that nuclear waste is no problem and everything is beeing thought of is something we hear since way back. Just burrow it and leave it for the next generations to take care of. Very thoughtful.

90% of nuclear waste can be reprocessed into usable nuclear fuel, the only reason it isn't, is because of legislation passed by the carter administration based solely on cold war fears, not on scientific fact. These reactors are definitly a positive thing.

Once we finish our space elevator we can just launch our radioactive waste into space... refuel our sun...

It's truly a pity that we can't provide advanced scientific research with the kind of support that business gets from government, though of course new ideas on how to rid nuclear waste and lower the scales required to generate would threaten much of our business today.

Goes with the plasma trash eradication:

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9707/McFarlane-9707.html

Derhorst - go bleed somewhere else, as there are too many people who actually know what they are talking about here.

I may be wrong, but I thought the reason there's a problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the processes used for recycling are the same as those used for upgrading nuclear fuel to "weapons grade".

So there's a whole political mess on how you're going to convince everyone that the processing plants are really only going to be used for non-weapons purposes.

And, then again, I could be wrong.

Man! Um getting tired of folks bitting my style. I told this same story in my book. " It Happened at Nextfest" This book tells how it went down. (http://www.lulu.com/content/1570109)

@ Kidd - How man, isn't the thought of lifting radioactive material way over our heads with the great potential for sabotage just a pleasing thought?!

Nuclear waste really isn't that big of a problem. Where do you think the waste is now? ALL of it is stored on plant sites, most of which have 30+ years of spent fuel just cooling in dry storage casks or in spent fuel pools. The NRC or the IAEA are there to make sure waste safeguards are in place to protect workers and the environment. They just need somewhere to put this waste in one space, which wouldn't need to be THAT big.

With regards to proliferation, the IAEA is explicitly responsible for ensuring that uranium isn't enriched to weapons grade and that plutonium isn't used for anything but MOX fuel.

About the cost of these things, that $2500/home is over the 5 year fuel cycle, which comes to about $41/month. If that's unmanageable, buy some candles.

It's amazing the amount of chemical pollution people ignore while demonizing radiation. Did you know that most of your food is irradiated? You are exposed to increased radiation during commercial flights? Every time you go outside? Radiation is not some instant poison, where every leak gives people cancer. Safety is important, and this industry is EASILY the most heavily safety-regulated one in the world. I spent 9 hours today learning how to locate >2 grams of HEU in a pipe array. Engineers are taking radiation seriously, and ignorance is holding this kind of innovation back more than anything else.

I missed the part that tells us how these are protected from Al Qaeda.

One other thing:

1. For nuclear power to be safe, EVERYTHING must go exactly as planned.

2. Nothing goes exactly as planned.

CONCLUSION

NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT SAFE! DUH!

Nimby^2

Your statement can bear the weight of no argument since you used "DUH" to argue an intellectual point.

OK, I spent 3 years on a nuclear powered submarine. There HAS to be a way to generate electricity, using the reactor to heat water to turn to steam to turn a generator, just having them won't create power. So therefore, MOVING PARTS! And nuclear power is perfectly safe. Only the misinformed and IDIOTS think otherwise.

Found this in my inbox, didn't know I was "subscribed" a feed here, but interesting post nonetheless.

So to clear on the math, it'd be $500/yr. investment if the $2500 per home is spread over the 5 year lifespan of the reactor? I assume we're just talking about the reactor and not transmission lines and all the other overhead that goes into distribution. I'm pretty sure my $20-$50/mo. electric bill for a Row Home in South Philly isn't just for power generation but also goes into maintaining a grid. Admittedly, I don't know much about rural/small community electricity provision; but I imagine "going it alone" with an independent project along these lines may have some costlier overhead than they would if a small community contracted to a traditional utility provider.

To keep my contribution to the discussion simple, I'll buy that nuclear power is largely safe in use aside from the waste issue, though seeding rural and small town America with these mini-reactors has got to create some security concerns ... everything from mischief to nuclear terrorism to protesters and radical green eco-saboteurs out of a Tom Clancy novel; and there are only so many "rural nuke protection" grants Homeland Security could provide.

That last line above leads to my last question. Can Hyperion and interested small communities just _do_ this? I find it hard to believe the the Dept. of Energy or what have you can be entirely out of this loop, since even smaller scale research reactors in universities require considerable regulatory oversight. Anyone in the regulatory community comment on this?

Of course, I'm aware that the post was a quick jot down to put something kind of "neat" on our radar, and wasn't pretending to be thorough analysis. Still, I think the most fun generated by this entry is all the questions it raises and hopefully gets at least partially answered in discussion.

@Nimby,

They are not, just like Al Qaeda is running around with American & Soviet weapons now, and they used Boeing (American) planes to kill thousands of Americans. Get back into your rabbit hole and hide out the winter.

I think they are a good idea, but I really want to see the statistics on the total cost of ownership.

This sounds like a solution to the third world, if people want to buy them. There are some security issues, but if those can be addressed, then I can see this moving forward. But I did like the idea of using to make hydrogen fuel.

I've actually operated the reactor on one of our fast attack subs as well as worked a few months at three mile island.

Most of what's left after the fuel has been used is still Uranium. That uranium can be reprocessed into new fuel plates. The daughter elements need to be removed and stored as waste.

I can't speak to the similarity of the process compared to Plutonium enrichment but I CAN say that the French get most of their energy from nuclear power and they recycle almost everything they use so it's a practice that is not without precedent.

Having seen with my own eyes the total waste output of TMI during it's 30+ years of operation I want to point out that the waste disposal issue is horribly overblown. If we are able to recover 95% of the spent fuel and use it again then what's left in the pool at TMI would fit in my basement.

The worst nuclear accident in U.S. history occurred at TMI but there was not a single fatality or injury. I could speak at length about the source of the accident or respond to the dubious speculation of health effects in the surrounding areas but I don't feel like typing all night.

I can also speak about Chernobyl which actually was a nuclear disaster but (and this is NOT an exaggeration) what they did there is the equivalent of asking a 12 year old to rev a cars engine to redline and then slam it into reverse. They were very stupid. They had an electrical engineer in charge of an experiment (instead of a nuclear engineer) and they disabled nearly every safety feature in the plant so that they could test the limits of the plant.
Even so the explosion was a pressure explosion, not a nuclear explosion.

Even IF someone in the US were stupid enough to do the same thing, our plants are all moderated by water which has a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, which means as the power output goes up the water becomes hotter and therefore less dense which helps to control the power rise by reflecting less neutrons back into the core. The soviets were moderating their core with sodium which has a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity. As power goes up the sodium becomes more dense and reflects more neutrons back into the core which serves to accelerate the chain reaction.

Back to the present day, the nuclear industry has been so successful in operating safely that I'd be surprised if anyone here can name even one emergency at a nuclear plant other than the two I've already addressed. I can think of two or three minor ones off the top of my head but they're nothing compared to what happens regularly at conventional power plants.
The average person seems to have convinced himself that nuclear power is the dangerous source but I would say that it's definitely the opposite. Start tracking casualties in the coal and natural gas industries, if they even make the news that is, and you'll see that these less regulated industries have a very disturbing body count compared to nuclear power which is about as close to zero as I think could be possible.

Finally it's true that there must be some kind of support system for the proposed reactors. They don't generate electricity, they generate heat which is usually turned into steam which turns a conventional turbine which generates the electricity. There would be a complete power plant on the surface, but I get the impression that only the reactor would be buried on the grounds along with most of the support systems such as the pumps which circulate water through the primary loop.

Sounds interesting if they're able to fully automate the reactor but unless I'm missing a major breakthrough that the article did not describe I don't think it would be all that different from what already exists.

Proliferation would be pretty tough with these things. When you steal it, the whole town's electricity goes off. Combine that with global positioning systems inside the thing, and you've just created a terrorist bait trap. Boom! Instant homeland security.

Nuclear energy is one of those things where, not not everything goes right, but SO MUCH has to fail in order for any damage to be done, that you're looking at odds of 10^-8 chances of any level 6 events happening in a year. Literally, 10^8 is the order of magnitude on the probability of a serious incident with modern engineering. Even something like TMI, where A LOT went wrong, no one was hurt. That's the point. Things go wrong, but other things account for that.

I like these things--would like to see how their coolant systems and generators work, but I think that's some serious proprietary info.

Regarding whether they can just team up with a community and place these things, I think they just need to be licensed by the NRC and have a workable evacuation plan for the community, for added safety. I doubt they would be building them without licensing.

i don't have any idea about the exact weight but i wanted to point out that this thing looks to be around the size of a VW rabbit which weighs more than a ton itself, but the VW has a lot of empty space and an engineering bias toward light materials whereas this reactor is a solid mass of lead, steel, uranium, water, concrete, and other heavy materials.

It's not like you could just back up to it with a a pickup truck and haul it off. Even if you could get a truck big enough to handle the load you'd also need a massive crane or some other kind of lifting device and you'd need to account for the pressurized water system connected to the reactor which if you tried to cut that off would probably kill you when it releases high pressure steam in your face, or if you decide NOT to cut it off then you'd need to cut it out of the concrete or steel support structure at least so far as to encompass the reactor and all of the coolant piping to include the closest cutoff valves.

If you don't understand everything I'm saying you can shorten the whole idea to 'impossible to steal'.

sabotage would be a more reasonable concern. Even then conventional explosives might not even crack the vessel.

I work in the nuclear business and was approached by Hyperion. I looked at their website and no one in their management has ANY experience in nuclear power, commercial power, or are even engineers. They all have marketing backgrounds. Even the "inventor" has never published a paper on nuclear technology. The "nuclear battery" concept is over 50 years old. They saw the growth of conventional nuclear, brushed off the cobwebs on a design so old it's not patented anymore, dropped bucks on marketing, and are selling a load of hype.

It doesn't make any sense from a physics point of view. To generate electricity it has to somehow exploit the temperature difference between a hot and a cold reservoir. That implies lots of moving parts, flowing liquids or gases, compressors, and cooling vanes, all of which break every so often and require plenty of maintenance.

I'm skeptical that this is just some scam marketing. Is Hyperion a penny stock?

Also, the security issue doesn't seem very well thought-out. How do you really secure all that fissionable material distributed all over the place?

Toshiba has a small reactor design that uses sodium as coolant, no pumps, with a 40 year service estimate. The reactor is similar in size, but here's the rub: It puts out 200 Kilowatts.

The graphic at the top of this page indicates a reactor of similar size at 27 Megawatts. That's a lot of heat in a small space, but US Nuke Sub reactors do this with highly enriched fuel. Why not a system buried underground, sealed in concrete surrounding a 6 inch thick stainless steel inside of which,surrounded by sodium, or molten salt, a few hundred pounds of 1400 degree F fissile material.. Hell of a thing for terrorists to dig out Joe Q...

Seems the OPERATIONAL Toshiba reactor and the PROPOSED Hyperion unit are at odds. Of course the design of this proposal is vague, after all Joe Q Public is quite ignorant of such things. However this was announced as a distinct US design under license from Los Alamos.

That point aside, the idea to reprocess most of the fuel needed for these reactors from spent fuel scattered around 100 sites in America makes sense. (It is correct 98% of the "waste" could be reconfigured into useable fuel) So to would a Thorium 232 to U 233 transmutation (breeder approach) to create more fuel for ongoing reactors that would not place Plutonium 239 into the waste stream.

I have relations and friends in Albuquerque will be in the area in January 09. Seems setting up an appointment and dropping in on these guys is in order. If this thing is real it would be a breakthrough specially with a breeder application. If it is bull crap I'll let people know. Until then it makes people like Joe Q seem petty and just looking for something to complain about out of Mom's basement.

I live in Hawaii and Maui could really use a system that eliminates Maui Electric Co's use of heavy diesal in its plant.

I've been hearing about these for some time now. They are truly amazing. I can only hope the NRC has the fore site to grant licenses for them. The Nuclear Renaissance is here! Read more about these:

http://www.babeled.com/2008/10/20/toshiba-unveils-miniature-nuclear-reactors/

The Navy developed several reactors like this quite a few years ago. I think that they still have a few in testing.

This may be slightly off topic but why is no research being done to try converting nuclear power DIRECTLY to electricity? Technically speaking, nuclear energy is just being used IN PLACE of thermal fuel to heat water for steam to ultimately drive the turbines. It's not like solar panels or a chemical battery where the energy from reaction itself is converted to electricity. Maybe, the more enlightened ones here could comment on this. Would I be too wrong to project that if a way could be devised to convert nuclear power directly to electricity then it could lead to miniaturisation as in small or even tiny nuclear power generators or rather converters. Over to you...

This is horrible! You could just set up 13-19 windmills up and you would have the money for that, and no way that nuclear power is clean. We really need to redifine clean if people think that co2 free means clean. Nuclear waste causes a bigger threat towards us than co2. we can possibly fix the global warming problem in a century if we act quick. But nuclear waste will stay for thousands of years. There's no way this can be right.

Where do you people live? Our electricity bill is consistantly over $300 per month for an average size 4 bedroom 2.5 bath home in Georgia. This is on an averaging plan so some months would be in the $100s and others in the $400s. This device would save the average family home owner tons of money per year even if it were $200 per month!

Look people...someday soon a brilliant engineer, or just someone with a little imagination, will discover a profitable use for nuclear waste. Whoever thought that people and cow poop would someday be recycled? Keep it safe for a while and you will be sitting on ticking gold mine!